AGAIN IN THE PHILIPPINES
Still unaware of the ruin that had come upon his hopes, Rizal was
living in Berlin and working on the last chapters of “Noli Me Tangere.”
He had taken cheap lodging in one of those huge modern German
apartment-houses, in the complex depths of which he could bury himself,
press on with his work, and be as remote as Tahaiti. He had known from
the beginning that he must bring out his book at his own expense, poor
as he was, if it was to be published at all. To a European publisher
the subject would seem too unconventional and outlandish; and as for
the Philippines, not a printer there would venture on his life to so
much as look at it. The type was set (in Spanish) in a small job-office
not far from Rizal’s lodging. Of the report that he himself eked out
his remittances by working at times as a compositor in this shop, there
is no satisfactory evidence; he had not previously appeared as a
printer, but with his marvelous dexterity and ease in assimilating all
knowledge he might have picked up even this craft, too, with others,
difficult as it is. If so, he may have enjoyed in Berlin an unusual
experience. He may have been an author putting into type his own copy.
One problem had harassed him. Whence could he hope to get the money to
pay for the publication? He was still largely supported by remittances
from home, from Paciano the ever faithful, from other members of his
family; but these were not more than enough to keep him alive. The
Fates that packed his wallet so full of other good gifts seem to have
omitted a facility in making money, but supplied in its stead an
abnormal power of self-denial. He now started out to save the sum he
needed by inciting the spirit to triumph over the flesh. About this
time there came to visit him in Berlin Maximo Viola, a wealthy and
excellent young Filipino he had known in Madrid. Viola records that he
found the young author living in a rear room and subsisting upon one
meal a day, largely bread and coffee, [84] which were cheap.
The raven had come that was not only to feed this prophet but to lead
him out of the wilderness. Viola’s object had been to invite Rizal to
go with him upon a walking tour through rural Germany and Switzerland.
At the proposal, Rizal’s eyes blazed; no project could be more alluring
to him, as Viola had well known. Then he said that it was impossible;
he could not go. Why impossible? asked Viola. Native pride forbade any
direct answer, but Viola extracted the truth. He was saving money to
publish a book. What kind of a book? Rizal told him, whereupon the
Filipino blood stirred in Viola’s veins also, and he offered on the
spot to advance enough money to bring out the book and then enough to
take Rizal on the walking tour.
A few weeks later, “Noli Me Tangere,” a finished novel of five hundred
pages, was printed and bound and launched upon its eventful way. [85]
The facts about this man would stagger credulity if they were not of so
sure and recent record. This novel of his contains more than two
hundred thousand words. He obtained his medical licentiate at Madrid in
June, 1885, and nothing of his book had been written then; nothing was
written until months later. After a time he went to Paris, where he was
employed as a clinical assistant to a busy oculist and also in pursuing
his studies. Thence he went first to Heidelberg, then to Leipzig, where
he entered the universities. Next we find him in Berlin, again an
active and laborious student. Yet “Noli Me Tangere” was completed on
February 21, 1887. The thing does not seem to be in nature. We cannot
recall another instance in literature of such rapid composition under
the like conditions of distraction.
It was a stormy petrel that he had set free, and trouble began early
because of and around it. His first object was to circulate it in the
Philippines. Nothing could have been more unpromising, with a
censorship keeping watch and ward and an author loathed and feared by
the whole System. Yet he accomplished the difficult feat. He had stout
friends in Barcelona and Madrid, Fernando Canon, Mariano Ponce, Damaso
Ponce, Ramon Batle, and, in especial, Teresina Batle, who was Mr.
Canon’s sweetheart. Her quick wit helped the conspiracy. Rizal sent to
Mr. Batle certain boxes containing copies of his book. These his
friends disguised as dry-goods and the like innocent freight and
forwarded to Manila. Ramon Eguarras and Alejandro Rojas were Manila
proprietors of substance and good repute. They smuggled the boxes past
the official Argus and before his very face. [86] When the authorities
awoke, the fierce new appeal was going from house to house with ominous
rumblings in its wake.
This could not last long. To know what the submerged people were
reading and thinking was one of the chief businesses of the bureau of
spies and department of sleuthing. Soon the censor was hot upon the
trail of this omen of unrest. A copy of the book was brought to him; he
read it with a horror that seems to have shaken his soul. Now the
attention of Government was called to the scandalous work. Government,
ever responsive to such ill news, appointed a committee of solemn owls
from the faculty of Santo Tomas, no less, to study and report upon a
literary felony so momentous; Government being apparently impressed
with the notion that a crisis was near and revolution was to be crushed
as usual in the serpent’s egg. For this nothing could be so effective
as the weight of an awe-inspiring authority from the university. No
great deliberation was needed to enable the committee to reach its
findings. In what was plainly intended to be a blasting fire of
ecclesiastical wrath, book and author were condemned, and Government
was austerely warned that here was a most insidious and perilous attack
upon all the safeguards of society, upon law and order, civilization,
monarchy, the supremacy of Spain, business, holy church, and religion
itself. [87]
Long experimentation with the surviving methods of the Inquisition had
made the Government expert in these matters. It issued at once a decree
excluding from the pious Islands a work of such sacrilege and ordered
diligent search to be made for any copies that might have slipped in to
corrupt virtue and overthrow the king. Wherever such copies might be
found they were to be burned by the public executioner. Most rigorous
punishments waited upon the heels of this decree. Any Filipino found
after a certain date in possession of a copy of “Noli Me Tangere” was
to suffer imprisonment or deportation, with the loss of all his
property; this to be confiscated for the benefit of whomsoever should
inform against him. Despite all this valorous resolving and proclaiming
and shaking of the long ears of senile decrepitude, the book continued
to come in and to be circulated. One may suspect that what the
Government chiefly effected was gratuitous advertisement. In a short
time “Noli Me Tangere” became the first topic of conversation
throughout the educated circles in the islands. The classes whose vices
and villainies were most fiercely attacked in it were its most
determined readers. Let the Government do its utmost to annihilate the
book; in the teeth of decrees, Civil Guards, spies, and inquisitors,
Rizal’s purposes were already accomplished. The corrupt, greedy,
tyrannical friar, the plundering, swaggering, brutal Spanish officer,
the beneficiaries of the System and those consenting to it, saw
themselves for the first time pilloried in print. [88]
About this process is always something more potent and salutary than
can be easily explained. It is the elusive, indomitable spirit of that
pitiless publicity, at once the armed champion of modern social
progress, the healer of its diseases, and the corrector of its errors.
Suppose the social malefactor to know full well, as well as he knows
anything, that when he reads in print the story of his misdeeds not one
hundred other persons are likely to see it; he is shaken with ineffable
alarm, nevertheless. The magic of the printed page overwhelms and
confounds him; in his ear every type-letter is a separate demon yelling
“Scoundrel!” Suppose him to have known theretofore that one hundred
thousand men were saying among themselves this that he now reads in
print; the knowledge would have disturbed him not to the quiver of an
eyelash. But to have it thus in visible record, open to the world’s
eye—intolerable! Many a man case-hardened otherwise to conscience or
reproof has fled to suicide before that unwavering finger and
relentless condemnation.
The life of all this is truth. Against printed words that are not true
even the guilty can make a stand, but it is invincible verity that
leaves him naked and trembling. When the first cold shiver had gone by
of the discovery that some one had at last dared to put into print the
horror of the Philippines, one cry for vengeance went up from the
stripped and shamed exploiters. It was a cry like the angry snarl of
hurt hyenas, ready to tear into pieces whomsoever should fall into
their den.
Presently there came among them the very man of their desire, the
author of all this, the object of all their furious hatred;
unsuspectingly he walked into their jungle.
When he had finished his book Rizal felt free to make the excursion
Viola had proposed. They tramped together through remote Germany and
saw something of Switzerland and of Austria. Rizal, as he went, studied
peasant life, and diligently he compared it with the conditions of the
Philippine farmers. At the end of the tour, he went to Dresden. There
he found that by reputation he was already known to Dr. A. B. Meyer and
other scientists, most of whom speedily became his friends. [89]
For some weeks the museums of Dresden detained him; now the splendid
collection of pictures, and now the unusual specimens in the zoölogical
and ethnological museums. Thence he passed to Leitmeritz, old Bohemia,
where he began that close and intimate friendship with Dr. Ferdinand
Blumentritt, the famous ethnologist, that was to last so long as Rizal
lived. For months they had been in correspondence; they had even
progressed in their letters to the stage of a more than ordinary
esteem; for Rizal, as we have seen, having so many other good gifts,
had also this abundantly, that he could cause his real self to shine
through the imperfect medium of the written word and make it appear
what it was, a spirit of power and grace. That he might be identified
at the station by his Austrian friend, Rizal sent in advance a
pencil-sketch he had made of himself, and with this in hand Dr.
Blumentritt knew him instantly. The high opinion the elder scientist
had formed of Rizal’s character and talents must have been justified
upon closer acquaintance; it appears that Rizal spent most of his time
at the Blumentritts’, and Mrs. Blumentritt signified her approbation of
him by cooking for him rare old-time Bohemian dainties, unknown to the
restaurants and hotels. [90] Thence to Vienna, where he became intimate
with Nordenfels, the Austrian novelist, and met other men prominent in
literature and art. Upon all these he seems to have left the uniform
impress of a mind strong, capacious, and candid, and a soul disciplined
and enlightened.
His studies in Vienna completed, he passed into Italy, and in a few
weeks was pondering the antiquities of Rome. Reviewing there his
observations and researches in so many lands, he concluded that the
time had come for him to return to the Philippines. The irregularity of
his passport by which he had escaped from Manila he had since
corrected; legally, he was as free as any one else to travel in the
Islands. His objective had been won; he had made good use of his time.
He might even have congratulated himself on the diligence of his
service. Consecration and an almost prodigious industry had made him
one of the foremost scholars of the day; he must now put to use the
resources he had gathered for the chief purpose of aiding his people.
If we knew more about his disastrous romance we might possibly find
that Leonora’s silence had become a motive to draw him home. What we do
know is that he was distressed by the reports he had of his mother’s
failing eyesight and eager to return to her and help her. For months a
double cataract had been growing upon her eyes. He felt sure that he
could remove it and restore her vision: it was to this branch of
optical surgery that he had given most heed. From Rome he sped to
Marseilles, took steamer on July 3, 1887, for Saigon, and transhipped
for Manila. On August 5, after five years of wanderings and so many
triumphs, he saw once more the green tide of the Pasig.
As soon as he landed he hastened to his mother at Calamba and, laying
aside every other business, devoted himself to the care of her eyes.
With entire success he performed the operation he had intended, the
first of the kind ever done in the Philippines. The fame of Mrs.
Mercado’s healing speedily went throughout all the Islands and beyond.
In the opinion of most persons of that day and region it meant that, by
a miracle as of old, sight had been restored to the blind; and, at a
word, Rizal stepped into eminence and a great practice. Of this he was
not unworthy. As we shall have occasion to see later, he was well aware
of his skill and learning; and, so far as the Orient was concerned, he
eclipsed all previous practitioners. Patients came to him with
confidence from all parts of the Philippines and even from China.
He had time to renew some of his old friendships, notably with Fernando
Canon, who had been fellow-student with him in old Spain and later one
of the most effective agents in getting “Noli Me Tangere” into the
Islands, whither he had lately returned. Some of the boxes that
contained copies of the book had been passed in as Mr. Canon’s stores.
One day, walking up and down with him at Calamba, Rizal revealed how
nearly the world had come to the loss of this work:
“I did not believe ‘Noli Me Tangere’ would ever be published. I was in
Berlin, heartbroken with sadness [91] and weakened and discouraged from
hunger and deprivation. I was on the point of throwing my work into the
fire as a thing accursed and fit only to die. And then came the
telegram from Viola. It revived me; it gave me new hope. I went to the
station to receive him and spoke to him about my work. He said he might
be able to help me. I reflected and then decided to shorten the book
and eliminated whole chapters. So he found it much more concise than it
had been. This accounts for the loose pages of manuscript to which you
have referred. But these will have a place in the continuation.
“I will publish seven volumes about Philippine conditions. Then if I do
not succeed in awakening my countrymen, I will shoot myself.” [92]
To his account of this incident Mr. Canon adds:
“Still there vibrates in my ears the inflections of his voice as he
said this. One could recognize Rizal anywhere by the tones of his
voice.”
In the midst of his busy employments, there fell upon him, early in
1888, a summons to Manila to appear before Governor-General Terrero.
This ominous message was the first repercussion from “Noli Me Tangere”;
the classes affronted in that book and burning for revenge were moving
to secure it. Here between the claws of their System was the man they
hated; it would go hard if he escaped where so many lesser men had
perished. With what feelings he obeyed the summons he has not told us,
but there can be hardly a doubt that he knew by whose manœuvers he was
now in the toils. It is the most singular fact in his whole strange
career that he never betrayed the least concern as to what should
become of him and throughout whatsoever process might be instituted
against him behaved as if it were the trial of another person of which
he was only the moderately interested witness. It was so now. With
unruffled self-possession he passed before the governor-general.
Terrero told him bluntly of the report of the committee appointed to
examine “Noli Me Tangere.” Rizal observed that the examination must
have been faulty, for the book was not what the committee had called it
but innocent. He made so able a defense that Terrero said finally that
as for himself he had read no more of it than the extracts the
committee had cited in its report, but now he should like to read it
all and judge for himself, and asked for a copy of it. This modest
request being (despite all fierce decrees) complied with, the
governor-general hemmed a little and said he feared that great enmity
had been aroused against Rizal among the classes he had described. It
was enmity that might even go so far as to attempt the author’s life.
For his safety, therefore, it had been deemed wise to assign to him a
body-guard so long as he should remain in the Islands.
Of this labored device Rizal might have said that it was but glass, and
the very sun shone through it. Henceforth every movement he made was to
be watched and reported, and here was the spy provided by the
Government, clumsy-clever, as usual, and forcible-feeble. [93]
Yet even this incident, as things fell out, was to contribute something
to his fame and little joy to his enemies. The body-guard assigned to
him was a young Spaniard, Lieutenant José de Andrade, born into the
governing class and fulfilled with all Spanish prejudices. Although his
associates were of the type that Rizal had so mercilessly pilloried, so
that in “Noli Me Tangere” he could hardly fail to recognize portraits
of intimate friends, Lieutenant de Andrade could not more than other
men withstand the singularly magnetic charm of this unusual
personality. [94] From his initial status as official spy and
watch-dog, he became Rizal’s devoted friend. Together they took long
walking trips into the country, climbed mountains, compared notes and
experiences, and recited verses. It is to be supposed that the
lieutenant returned the reports he was assigned to make, but reasonably
certain that they contained no matter that gratified the hatred of the
reactionary element.
We have noted what frenzy of consternation seized upon that element at
the lightest whisper of revolt among the oppressed people. It was one
of the invariable characteristics of the Spanish domination, an
intermittent fever under the empire of which all reason or semblance of
reason went to the winds and men outside the asylums acted like raving
maniacs. Such manifestations of this strange psychology (only to be
explained by recalling the Spaniard’s total misunderstanding of the
Filipino nature) as followed the uprising of 1872 were still remembered
by oppressor and oppressed. It was now revived for both as knowledge
spread of this strange and powerful book. Besides the unendurable smart
of its lash, the governing class saw in it consequences of the gravest
import. It was standing and irrefutable evidence that the contempt for
the native upon which Spanish rule proceeded was baseless; a native had
created literature of the highest order. Still more alarming, it
threatened to lead the way, to offer the example, to pioneer ceaseless
ambuscades of the same kind, to show that the thing superstitiously
held to be above all attack could be attacked safely and even with
ridicule and this deadly laughter. If the author of “Noli Me Tangere”
should escape without punishment, imitators might be expected on every
side. Any native anywhere might take up similar weapons; hence, the
white man’s supremacy in all the East was in jeopardy.
It is not easy for the Occidental mind to grasp the power this
suggestion has upon men charged with the holding in subjection of vast
Asiatic populations; but it is to such men always the first
consideration. It must be, in fact; because their situation is so
abnormal that in times of cool reflection they must wonder at
themselves. With bands of soldiers insignificant in numbers they are
required to impose upon millions a sovereignty that the millions
generally loathe. Diligently, then, they must support the fiction of
the white man’s superiority, support it day and night without ceasing
and be not too finical about means or manner. Doubtless, to many the
task soon becomes congenial, so easily is race hatred bred in places
out of the observation of Europe, and so strong is the addiction to it
in some hearts not yet well removed from the stone age. Yet there have
often appeared in these grimy scenes Europeans that instinctively hated
the business and knew well enough that at bottom the real reason for
dominating these subject peoples was dirty profits dirtily obtained.
[95] But these very men, again and again, by the clamors about them and
by the panic nature of the fears of what the aroused brown millions
might do, have been swept despite themselves into acts at which their
better natures revolted.
Governor-General Terrero was of this order, and even above its average.
He was willing at the instigation of angry friars to assign a spy to
watch Rizal but was determined to avoid the silly and stupid crime of
shooting or garroting or even exiling a man whose offense was that he
had written a novel some persons did not like. In other days and other
administrations men had been shot or garroted or exiled on charges as
flimsy, but light was breaking in Spain; even in the face of tradition
and old frowning privilege, light was breaking. The first rift in the
medieval eclipse was driven by the sword of Napoleon. Slowly ever since
it has been widening to echoes of the world’s advance elsewhere. In
1888 the governing class in Spain had become aware of the scorn of that
world and began to feel a little the sting of it. Not much, then, nor
since, as we are to see in this narrative, and might illustrate by
other citations. Lo, it was this same Spain, and so late as 1909, that
murdered Francisco Ferrer, the most learned man in her dominions, for
but teaching her children in the manner of other nations—nations so far
in the front of her that, looking back, they could scarce descry the
dust of her sluggard footsteps!
Terrero, at least, was not indifferent to the verdict of enlightened
mankind; yet the pressure upon him to take some action against this
atrocious leveler and dangerous character was greater than he could
withstand. It came from the power that made or broke governor-generals,
the power of the orders, supreme in the Islands, supreme in Spain on
any matter that related to the Islands. By the beginning of 1888 their
demand had reached a point where he must compromise with it, and he
“advised” Rizal to leave the Philippines at once. The word is equivocal
and was meant so to be; the real significance of “advice” in this
instance was an unofficial order of deportation. [96]
Rizal obeyed, but not until he had given to the world new evidence of
the versatility of a genius to which there is scarcely a companion in
human records. We are to remember, first of all, he was a physician
that had chosen diseases of the eye for his specialty, wherein he stood
in a place of distinction before his profession. He was next an artist
in sculpture and painting; a poet; a master of terse and nervous prose
in Spanish, in his native Tagalog, and in ten other languages. He was
next a scientist, distinguished in original research, already honored
with the regard of leading European minds in many branches of recondite
knowledge. This, it will be admitted, is a most unusual range of
pursuits. From them economics might be regarded as far removed and
negligible. Yet he now showed that his many-sided mind could enlist its
energies in even the “dismal science” and his skill in expression could
illuminate it.
Taxes in the Philippines had always been haphazard. They were levied
without system or anything akin to system. Only one feature about them
could be said to be uniform: everywhere the wealthy evaded their just
share of the taxation burden; everywhere the poor bore more than was
right for them to bear. The history of Spanish rule was a succession of
promises of reform, usually wrenched by an insurrection from the
unwilling lips of a governor-general and ignored when the time of
danger had passed. In the year of grace 1888 came such a reformatory
spasm about taxes. When it reached Calamba it was received with
exceptional interest for the reason that the Dominicans, with whom the
householders had an ancient feud, owned a great deal of property there
and on it paid very little.
This, though outside of Rizal’s studies, was a subject all within the
purpose to which he had consecrated himself. He was to live for his
people; he was to do whatever came to his hand to help them to rise.
Here was a poignant illustration of the vast and complicated evils that
weighed them down. Since his first interview with Terrero he had been
living at Calamba in his mother’s house, practising with brilliant
success his profession and lending his influence to every project that
seemed to promise good for the Filipinos. His prestige and influence
had become great. Despite all the efforts of the Government, knowledge
of his book and of its meaning was wide-spread. Copies were continually
being smuggled into the country and passed from hand to hand. Often at
the approach of officers they were buried in fields or rubbish-heaps
and dug up again when the danger was gone. A Filipino that could read
was a popular man, then, in his community; he found much employment
reading “Noli Me Tangere” to groups that cowered in the brush, maybe, a
sentinel posted to give warning of the approach of the Civil Guard. The
result of all this could be but one thing. From the mass of the
despised Filipinos he was emerging as their natural leader.
He observed now the approach of the taxation issue and, one might say,
went forth to meet it. His facile and powerful mind absorbed the whole
business. Taxation he studied until he seemed to know more about it
than any other man in the Islands. In the manner of the true modern
investigator, he sought for facts, not arguments: what the poor man
paid upon his small holding, what the rich owner paid upon his great
estate. When these had been gathered, he reduced them all to a report
that the overburdened taxpayers took for their own and presented to the
Government impressively signed by their local officers. [97]
He had done more here, very likely, than he himself knew. The document
thus prepared became the rallying-point for another of those struggles
between the people and the Government that increasingly signaled the
downfall of the existing System. Slowly the nineteenth century was
closing in upon the sixteenth, democracy upon the autocracy that at the
borders of civilization still outlived the date of its normal demise.
Rizal’s work on taxation showed the Filipinos what they could do by
uniting their efforts. In their country, too, the exploiter held the
exploited by fomenting among them envyings, jealousies, and caste; a
process that everywhere attends (and usually comprises) the white man’s
burden, and whereof India offers the chief surviving example. In the
face of every obstacle and discouragement the Filipinos were now
learning the lesson of union, and the only shadow union cast forward
was revolt.
Rizal’s leadership was a phrase we used in a foregoing paragraph. It is
to be noted that he came into that eminence without an effort of his
own, without planning or connivance. He was elated to find greatness
thus thrust upon him and would not have been human otherwise; yet to be
conspicuous had never been any real part of his scheme of life, and
when elation was at its height it never obscured the fact that what he
really sought was a result for the country and not kudos for himself.
But he was the most famous of living Filipinos; knowledge of his place
among the world’s scientists was now general among his countrymen;
those that had not been able to read “Noli Me Tangere” nor to hear it
read were becoming aware by common report of the nature of its protest.
He was the one man that had been able to make the bitter cry of the
Filipinos audible to the world. He had best formulated and expressed
the wrongs under which those people suffered. He alone, with this
fierce derision, had dared to defy the power of the friars and the
brutal fists of the Civil Guards. Naturally, the people turned to him,
and the unanimity with which they sought his counsel might have shown
the Spaniards again among what fires they were walking; for the spirit
that gave rise to the popularity of Rizal was even more significant
than anything he said in his book. Before that book was written the
spirit had been there; it was growing while the friars debated the best
means to suppress the audacious author; it was certain to break out
into open revolt—if not under Rizal, then under some one else.
In view of these conditions, Rizal has been subjected to some criticism
for obeying the sugar-coated deportation-order of the governor-general
and taking himself from the Islands at a time so momentous. The
criticism is not now important but, to keep straight the thread of
narrative, may be examined here. To say nothing of the obvious fact
that, as the power of the governor-general was absolute, hesitation to
obey would be followed by an explicit command, other things were to be
considered. All Rizal’s instincts strove against the idea of advance by
physical violence. He believed in the weapons of the spirit, not in the
carnal sword. To defy the governor-general’s “advice” meant but one
thing. It would be a direct appeal to physical force; it would be
followed by revolution and slaughter; and to these he felt he could
never consent.
Moreover, he was up to this time not in favor of immediate separation
from Spain. On this issue his views have been distorted by
controversialists that have selected expressions seemingly favorable to
one side or the other of a disputed question. Long after events had
wholly changed the face and the substance of Philippine affairs it was
the custom of persons opposed to Philippine independence to cite Rizal
in support of their arguments. This was unfairly done. Reference to one
undeniable fact should be enough to dispose of the fabricated
uncertainty about his views on this question. All the reforms he strove
for looked to independence and could not look to anything else. It was
not for academic satisfaction he desired increase of culture among his
people, but that with wisdom and confidence they might take their place
among the nations of earth. It was not for the mere sake of teaching
that he desired to see them taught, but that they might be taught to be
free.
When we recognize this basis, which shows plainly enough in his
writings, [98] his attitude toward Spain, otherwise mysterious or
contradictory, is consistent enough to suit any taste. He wished Spain
to grant reforms, to adopt a system of education that would meet some,
at least, of the urgent needs of the people, to unchain the press, to
remake the grotesque courts, to recognize the people of the Islands as
human beings, and to give them something to live for. The effect of
these changes, he well knew, would be to release the Filipino mind, and
when that should be set free the result could be only one thing. It was
darkness and ignorance that enabled Spain to rule; the symbols of all
her power were of the night. But he thought the reforms that would
allow the Filipino to stand upright before the world Spain itself must
grant; to try to wrest them from her, gun in hand, would be to miss
them altogether. Spain must grant them. True, she would thereby be
lighting her own eventual exit from the Islands, but he was able to
make himself believe (for a time) that the Spanish Government could be
persuaded, or led by events, to do this thing. This was a lovely dream
and possible only to one of faith larger than the average man’s in the
innate strength of a cause just and reasonable. It was not really in
him inconsistent that all this time he was under no illusion about the
bespattered record and reactionary tendencies of the controlling power
in Spain; what he thought, apparently, was that by bringing home to
that power a sense of the world’s contempt and urging the need of
sweeping reforms such agitation would generate its own compulsive and
undeniable force. He is not the only man in history in whom the sense
of justice was so strong it obscured its total want in others.
But even so, in a way, what confronted him and the Philippines at the
moment was beyond choosing. The immediate demand must be for the
reforms that lay in Spain’s power to give or to withhold; these were
imperative; that a start may be made upon the road, let us unite and
demand these first reforms.
There can be no manner of doubt that these were the ideas that
controlled him when Terrero “advised” him to depart, and none that in
the next few years his views on these subjects contracted as he looked
more searchingly upon the troglodyte methods of the Spanish rulers. He
was the less reluctant to leave the Philippines because his private
life, apart from his career of service, had been darkened by the
catastrophe of his love-affair; he had come home to find Leonora
married. Two other impulses concurred to urge him away. The success of
“Noli Me Tangere” (despite so many and powerful measures taken to
suppress the book) and the manifest effect of it upon the Filipino mind
must have strongly reminded him of that sequel he had vaguely intended
when he completed the last chapters of his novel. He could not hope to
accomplish any such work at home; he could not hope, even if he should
write it there, to find a publisher for it in the Islands nor to
smuggle out the manuscript. To write it he must be abroad. Next, he had
seen much of Europe but nothing of that American Republic about which
Jagor’s prophecy had so inflamed his youthful mind. Here, by Jagor’s
logic, was the power destined some day to transform all the regions
bordering upon the Pacific, and he had never seen it. This was also the
country whose history and spirit he had glimpsed in the “Lives of the
Presidents” that he so eagerly read and returned to. In that country
farmers’ boys, canal-boat drivers, tailors’ apprentices,
rail-splitters, journeyman printers, any son of the plain people could
rise to any place, even the highest. It was a country that
conspicuously had won to freedom and independence out of a gross
tyranny. Therefore, it had a peculiar claim to his attention. As he
must go somewhere, he planned to return to Europe by way of the United
States.
He was relieved of all anxiety about his mother. The eyesight of her
youth had been restored to her.
This time there was no difficulty about his passport and no need that
he should, like an escaping criminal, steal at night from the city. The
responsible powers were but too glad to have him go. He sailed from
Manila on February 28, 1888, going first to Hong-Kong. There and in the
neighboring city of Macao he visited and talked with many refugees and
exiles of 1872, annus hystericus in Philippine history. By deportation
or flight that year the islands had lost hundreds of their best minds
and ablest servitors. That many of these were afterward proved to have
had nothing to do with the uprising for which they were banished or
hunted is superfluous evidence of the mad psychology of the time. In
most of these cases there were no trials, no investigations, no
queries. Some one frenzied with fear imagined the man across the street
to be behaving in a way that indicated conspiracy; to the Ladrones with
him! Some one else saw two men in the street salute each other with
suspicious gravity; the next morning both were on their way to the
Carolines. [99] The Herrara family had maintained a back yard quarrel
with the Venturas. Mr. Ventura was denounced and spent the rest of his
life in loneliness at Macao. It was the Lion’s Mouth and the cachets of
the Bastile, revived for the astonished instruction of the age of
steam. Cases are in the records of men that were seen carrying home
bundles—fish, maybe, or steak. “Bombs!” cried the officers, under the
sway of emotion, and that night haled the unfortunate householder from
his bed. Sometimes the intended victims of these maniacal
manifestations received friendly hints before the blow fell and had
time to flee to the woods, whence they made their way out of the
country, to live, very likely, in the utmost poverty.
Such was the lot, in fact, of most of the men deported. One of them, a
learned lawyer, the ornament of the Philippine bar, as innocent of the
conspiracy as the premier of Spain himself, was twenty years later
picking up the crumbs of a living by trying to practise a little
Spanish law in London. [100]
It is to be assumed that conversation with such men did nothing to
soften Rizal’s spirit or to cool his ardor of service. They were the
living monuments to the hopeless incapacity of the existing System to
govern or to advance. From his days and nights in their company he
passed to Japan, where in the space of one month he achieved the almost
incredible feat of mastering the Japanese language. But for the
testimony of the facts the hardiest biographer would scarce dare the
assertion. Rizal came to Japan with scarce a word of Japanese; he
remained but one month; before he departed he was speaking it so well
that the natives thought he was a countryman of theirs, and he was
acting as their interpreter. Thereafter he could speak and write
Japanese as readily as English or German.
At Hong-Kong he had been somewhat surprised to find himself invited to
the Spanish consulate and urged to abide there. [101] At Tokio this
experience was repeated, the Spanish legation offering him its
hospitality and even suggesting employment as a translator. The
purposes of these advances were clear enough. He was one that the
Government willed, after its custom, to have always under surveillance;
to have him beneath a legation roof was easier and cheaper than to hire
secret service men.
From Yokohama he sailed for San Francisco, astonishing his
fellow-travelers by conversing with all the aliens in their own
tongues, whatever these might be. Among them was a Japanese that knew
not a word of English. Rizal attached himself to this unfortunate and
acted as his interpreter all the way to London.
When he landed at San Francisco, April 28, 1888, his first experiences
under the American flag were hardly calculated to swell his enthusiasm
for the republic. It happened to be a time when a terror of epidemics
was afoot, and he might have reminded himself from what he saw that
sporadic hysteria is not the exclusive possession of the Spaniards nor
of anybody else. What a whisper of insurrection meant to a Spanish
government officer in Manila, a vision of a cholera-germ might signify
to a health-officer in America. The health authorities of San Francisco
were then busily quarantining everything that came into the port. To
them the fact that Rizal’s steamer carried a clean bill of health meant
nothing, nor that she had been properly inspected and cleared at
Yokohama, nor that no disease had developed among her people on the way
over. Who knew what horrent microbes might be lurking in her woodwork
or snugging in the coal-hole? Therefore, authority decreed to hold her
day after day in quarantine while the passengers chafed and fidgeted
and the British among them complained to their consul and threatened an
international scandal. [102]
Rizal seems to have endured the affliction with his customary
philosophy. From the deck he made sketches of the new country that thus
slammed its doors in his face—among them a reproduction of the revenue
flag, with its eagle and perpendicular bars, which he thought was a
novel and taking design. He did not fail to observe, however, that
while the human beings on the steamer were rigidly quarantined the
cargo was unloaded, and he wondered how infection could be carried by
the passengers and not by the freight. When he was released, he went to
the old Palace Hotel in San Francisco and spent several days observing
the strange life of the city. Thence, by train over the mountains,
noting with astonishment how great an area of the country through which
he passed was uninhabited, and apparently being rather entertained than
enraged by the horrors of the American sleeping-car. Two things of much
greater moment impressed him sadly. One was the race prejudice against
the Chinese in San Francisco (then at its height), and the other the
race prejudice against the Negro, manifested in some other parts of the
country.
Afterward he wrote this summary of his swallow flight across the
continent:
I visited the larger cities of America. They have splendid
buildings and magnificent ideals. America is a home-land for the
poor that are willing to work. I traveled across America, and saw
the majestic cascade of Niagara. I was in New York, the great city,
but there everything is new. I went to see some relics of
Washington, that great man who, I fear, has not his equal in this
century.
From Albany he had gone forward by the Hudson River, and was greatly
impressed with its magnificent scenery, but thought that, in the way of
commerce alone, the Pasig was busier. From New York he sailed on the
steamer City of Rome, then esteemed a maritime masterpiece, and reached
London, where he found lodgings with the organist of St. Paul’s
Cathedral and settled himself for a season of work and study.
Part of this work became afterward an invaluable legacy to his
countrymen and literature. In his youth he had heard of a wonderful
book, of which only two or three copies existed in all the world, a
book written in 1607 [103] about the Philippine Islands and their
people as they were then. A blunt, honest old Spaniard, Antonio de
Morga, had written it, apparently with no purpose except to tell the
truth, an impulse that in itself for his times was enough to confer
distinction. Other Spanish writers of that day had written to create
desired impressions, to justify theories or to excuse the Spanish
aggression, whereby the lies had dripped like oil from their pens. De
Morga had as good a chance as anybody else to know the Islands; he had
accompanied one of the earliest of the Spanish expeditions and for
seven years had been a part of its exploits. One of the few copies of
his book, “Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas,” was in the British Museum.
Rizal formed the ambitious design to rescue it from oblivion and
republish it, annotated and clarified.
With some difficulty he ran the barrage so strangely erected around
this institution and found the precious volume to be all that had been
said in praise of it. De Morga’s observations, evidently unbiased,
established what Rizal had long surmised and then asserted, that the
Filipinos had been historically wronged. The sea-coast folk, at least,
the bulk of the nation, had not been more truly savages when Magellan
came than the Spaniards themselves. From de Morga’s accounts it was
easy to show that the Filipino’s spirit, activities, and general
welfare had been in no way bettered by Spanish rule. Arts, industries,
products in the Islands, and even energy, seemed to have been more
observable among the people in de Morga’s day than at the close of the
nineteenth century.
This was a matter of grave importance to the Islanders and so remained
long after Rizal’s labors had ceased. The Spanish excused to the world
their presence and their cruelties alike on the one ground that the
Indio was a savage. Suppose him without European restraint and European
inspiration, they said; he would revert to his caves, his raw meat, and
his bows and arrows. To learn that he was heir to these centuries of
dignity and worth was not only disconcerting but raised a question to
which there was no answer. If he was as civilized as the Spaniard, why
had he not the Spaniard’s right to be free?
De Morga described at length the arts and industries that flourished in
the Philippines long before a Spanish flag had fluttered above their
waters; the excellence in weaving, in metalwork, agriculture,
government, domestic arts, commerce, navigation; how the natives lived
and worked, what good ships they built, what busy marts they had
erected. [104] On this Rizal’s observations are shrewd and witty, but
he sometimes allowed his joy over the vindication of his people and of
his own theories about them to sweep him out of that coolly scientific
attitude he usually maintained about such things. For this he may be
forgiven. He was sensitive, he was proud; he had suffered for the
unjust disparagement of his race; he was dealing with evidence that the
Filipino stock was as good as any other, as much entitled to
development in its own way.
While he was making these studies he found relaxation in athletics. He
screwed together some of his regularly apportioned time to get into the
fields and play. He learned to box and to play cricket; he had long
been an expert fencer. [105] At cricket he was so good that it seems a
pity baseball came so late into his country; it is a game that would
have exactly suited his tastes and inclinings. In the combination of
alert mentality and swift physical action that baseball requires must
be something peculiarly attractive to the Filipino, for do but observe
the astonishing records he has made at it, exciting the admiration of
the most experienced judges. Rizal had never forgotten the training in
physical exercise he had received from his uncle; he still loved to
fence, to ride, to run, to take long, swift walks. His faith was all in
the mental health that is fortified by physical well-being; when all
his mental enginery had been working full tilt he found ease in the
open air, in quick motion and the trees and flowers. His body was as
supple as a wrestler’s, and in support of his theories of reciprocal
mental and physical soundness it is to be remarked that in all his life
he seems never to have been seriously ill.
In London he found congenial company in the household of Dr. Antonio
Regidor, a Filipino that had suffered exile in the Cavite frenzy of
1872. Dr. Regidor had three charming daughters. Rizal’s ideas of life
and conduct may be gathered from the fact that when, after a time, he
discovered that one of these young ladies was forming an attachment for
him, instead of being elated he was much troubled in his mind and
concluded that in such circumstances the best thing he could do was to
take himself out of the young lady’s sight. For once the paths of duty
and expediency fell together. By this time he had completed his work at
the museum and he now departed for Paris.
There, Juan Luna, [106] the Filipino painter, with whom Rizal had
formed a close friendship while both were in Madrid, 1882 to 1885, had
now made his home and Rizal seems to have rejoiced to renew his
associations with his talented countryman. It is certain that the
stupidity of race prejudice, which has so many other and blacker wrongs
to answer for, has deprived this man of a certain part of his just
reward. Yet he was a great painter, the winner of prizes in many
European competitions, and an artist that Paris delighted to honor.
[107] A contemporary and fellow Filipino, Hidalgo, was hardly less
successful; so seldom are their achievements counted in any summary of
the Malay that most unjustly America is still unaware of them. Rizal
usually spent his Sundays in Luna’s studio, sometimes fencing,
sometimes talking art, of which he was still, for all his troubles,
distractions, and complex activities, the steadfast worshiper.