WHAT MANNER OF MAN
More than the persecutions launched against his family disturbed Rizal
in the news he was receiving now from Manila. The fire of discontent
was rising among the people of the Philippines; the letters of his
friends foreshadowed an explosion. Not revolution by peaceful means was
at hand but another civil war. He determined to go to Madrid that he
might talk with the Filipinos there about these storm-signals and at
the same time lodge with the Spanish Government a formal protest
against the eviction of the family from its Calamba property.
At Madrid he found the situation much changed in the five years of his
absence. In the Filipino colony the feeling had gained that from such a
Government nothing was to be won by appeals and agitation. For an
illustration men pointed to Cuba. Petitions, reasonings, arguments,
beseechings wrought nothing. Whatever Cuba had gained was tribute to
its sword. Against this Rizal still counseled. Even in such a crisis he
could not rid his mind of the doctrine of fitness for self-government,
and so long as he reasoned more than he allowed himself to feel, he
could not compromise with his overmastering horror of war.
In this, again, he had outstripped the current thought of his age. A
world without war was then the dream of a few enthusiasts, looking to
another generation or to some mystic transformation in the chemistry of
human blood; what were called practical men went on devising new
torpedoes and more powerful explosives for the next conflict. In his
own way, different from theirs, he was himself as truly a practical man
as ever lived, and a warless humanity was no dream to him; he thought
he could see it close at hand. He thought he could see his fellow-men
of all lands surrendering the lunacy of combat for a rational
settlement of international troubles by agreement and arbitration. Out
of the reflexes of his own thought and spirit he was instructed that
the hour for this transformation had come.
Up to that time, certainly, the lessons of history, his favorite study,
were against him. There can be no doubt that a condition of oppression
or general injustice is in essence a condition of violence, and so far
in the human story half-emancipated man has found no way to end one
condition of violence except by means of another. “It will have blood,
they say, blood will have blood,” might have been written across the
gates of every house of tyranny. The hope that the frightful wrongs
laid upon the Filipinos could be an exception to this primordial rule
was alluring to a soul like Rizal’s. We can see now that in the
existing stage of civilization it was no better founded than the other
deceptive notion that the sufferings of the common people of France
under the Ancient Régime could have had any result but retribution in
kind. As a matter of strict fact, the Reign of Terror was established
years before Dr. Guillotin thought of his device of “a certain movable
framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history.” It was
in reality assured by the fathers of many innocent and well meaning
ladies and gentlemen whose heads it rolled into the Seine—a painful
thought, but historically indisputable. The fierce philosophy of these
records Rizal could not assimilate; the poet in him revolted at the
ugliness of hatred; he had too genuine a love of his own kind to
tolerate cruelty. Whether in the mass or toward individuals he could
not endure it. These seem to constitute the only set of facts his mind
was unable to absorb. He could in four weeks master a language and
could not in a lifetime well comprehend the caveman’s logic of blows.
This amiable strabismus half blinded him to what was really impending
in his own country. The truth was that the System was slowly forcing a
revolt there; not intentionally, but after the manner of all drunken
power. To lay bare the iniquities of that System was to send against it
the torch and ax. Every page of “Noli Me Tangere” was in effect a call
to battle. He never suspected this, but fact it was nevertheless. To
imagine, as he at one time imagined, that intrenched greed would
without a struggle surrender its privileges and lay by the cracking of
its whips was to imagine that which never was nor shall be. The
reversion to primitive standards was inaugurated, not by Filipino
revolutionists, but by the System itself, which, denying justice, left
to the harassed multitudes nothing but revolution.
At this crux of his story, when he appeared at Madrid as the champion
of an impossible peace, and the eyes and hearts of all his countrymen
were turning to him, the time may be good to describe the man that had
already wielded so tremendous a power.
He was then in his thirty-first year. The first impression one had of
him was of wholesome vigor and physical well-being. He was of rather
slender build, but all of muscle and sinew compact, for he never
remitted his exercises. In height, he was five feet, four inches;
coming of what seems to Occidental eyes an undersized people. From long
hours at his desk he had contracted a slight stoop. His handsome face
retained its fine boyish oval, but rugged character and unshakable
firmness were now stamped upon it, and an expression of melancholy. His
eyes were still remarked for their brightness. His hands were small and
shapely, his feet noticeably small. [142]
His voice was low in pitch, of a noble tonality, and so strangely
vibrant that one hearing it at its best never forgot it. One of his
rules was never to raise it; he spoke always with an identical
restraint. With such a voice and with his flow of apt and picturesque
language he was equipped for public speaking, in which he had made on
several occasions a rather marked success; yet he always thought
lightly of the art of oratory and refused to pursue it.
Whether among his friends or in his writings he had ordinarily little
to say about himself, and there is but one recorded instance when he
seemed to give way to the bitter recollections that must at times have
assailed him. On this occasion he said to a friend in London with whom
he was walking:
“I have traveled around the world. I have studied the important nations
by personal and direct observation. I have noted well all the races
that have contributed to human progress. I speak all their languages
and others. And yet,” he added with a melancholy smile, “I am to the
friars merely a vulgar half-breed.”
At Madrid, one of his intimates from the Islands was Teodoro Sandiko,
later to be a leader among his people and an honored member of the
Philippine Senate. In a letter recalling their association, Senator
Sandiko once wrote: [143]
Rizal was fond of physical exercise and so was I. We practised
fencing together and soon became good and close friends.
He was simple in his manners, but profound in his studies and
researches, analytical in his mental processes, reflective rather
than sentimental. He was extremely methodical and industrious; I
never saw him idle. He had great confidence in himself, was firm in
his faith, resourceful in the solving of a difficult situation,
swift and sure in his decisions. His habit was to answer without
hesitation and succinctly any question that might be put to him; he
had never to hunt for an idea or a word. He was the most loyal of
friends; anything he possessed was at his friend’s disposal. He was
courteous, affectionate, affable, sincere, but rather serious. His
mental state may be judged from the mass of material he contributed
to “La Solidaridad,” so varied, so forceful and so carefully
prepared.
Wherever he went, he seemed without effort to make friends of all men
that came near him. Set down in a steamer full of strangers, he would
be noted at once by every passenger and before dinner was served would
be on good terms with most of the persons on board, crew included. Yet,
strange to say, he seldom smiled, usually seemed distrait in the midst
of others’ mirth, and was sometimes lost in gloomy musing, when he
seemed all unaware of his surroundings. In the opinion of his friends,
he had almost no self-consciousness; certainly, all his life he hated
affectations and never lost a chance to scorch them with his terrible
sarcasm; for this man of the world, ordinarily so suave and courteous
that he won good will even among his enemies, had certain reserve funds
of censuring speech he could make as bitter as gall. Whether he sat,
walked, stood, talked, or listened he was always natural, always
composed, and always the sure master of himself. When he went through
the United States he noticed that the men there conversed without
gesticulating, contrary to the practice of the Spaniards and most
Europeans. On reflection he deemed the practice to lend strength to
utterance and thereafter made it a rule to keep his hands still while
he talked.
The image of a man that seldom smiled and yet so easily won his fellows
to like him seems out of the drawing of nature and yet in this case is
essentially true. There was in Rizal’s face something almost
irresistibly winning. Good will looked out of it and warm human
sympathy and a kind of downright sincerity that found a way to the
notice of even the dullest. It seemed to one studying him attentively
that on the original lines of a being all love, gentleness, and
meditation had been stamped later a great melancholy and a great and
high resolve. Lowly men seemed to understand instinctively something in
him they could never have formulated nor described, something friendly
and good; and men of learning turned with a similar impulse to a mind
that showed itself so wealthy and still so unpretending.
He loved music, was a good judge of it, and composed it readily and
well. He loved flowers as all other things beautiful—of course, being
an artist born and the instinct ineradicable in him! That charming poem
of his, “The Flowers of Heidelberg” [144] was written in the intervals
between his pursuits of the most advanced discoveries and driest facts
in ophthalmology, surgery, ethnology, entomology, anthropology, and the
penning of some of the fiercest passages of condensed wrath to be found
in any language. It is likely that he saw nothing grotesque in these
abrupt transitions; perfectly sincere men have little time for such
nice questionings. If we regard the making of poetry as the serious
business of his soul, which it was, his chief intellectual relaxation
was chess, of which, by the time of his second visit to Madrid, he had
become a notable player. [145]
He had as little vanity as any man conscious of his powers could
reasonably have. Yet he was always careful of his appearance and took
pains to dress well, after the most modest taste. Even when he was
poverty-stricken in Berlin and living on a daily bowl of coffee and
piece of bread, he would allow himself no laxity in his attire.
Once he wrote of some pupils of his that he was teaching them to behave
like men. [146] It was a point of weight with him. His conception of a
man was one that had at all times himself in full command. This virtue
he had practised assiduously from those old days at the Ateneo when
first he perceived its splendors; and now he was so truly captain of
his own soul that, as we have seen, he could endure privations, subdue
appetites, and urge himself along his road by the sheer force of his
will. He was the greater part of his life desperately poor; yet if he
had been willing to practise his profession for gain a great fortune
was within his grasp. In whatsoever conditions he found himself he
still tried to adhere to that plan he had adopted at the Ateneo of
apportioning his day according to a schedule. He was more careful of
his time than a miser of his gold; he would waste no hour. To his
friends he admitted that when he sat silent in company and seemed to be
moody he was composing his next article for “La Solidaridad” or a new
chapter in one of his books. He was the least superstitious of men, but
for years he had a presentiment that he would die by shooting. Once
crossing Bagumbayan Field he pointed to the place of execution and said
to a companion, “On that spot I shall some day be put to death by a
firing-squad.” As a final light upon a singular character, it is to be
noted that he was not oppressed by this foreboding. It was accompanied
in his mind, as nearly as one can discern, with a conviction that the
cause for which he stood must have its victims, and to this extent and
no farther showed in him the fatalism supposed to be a distinctive
trait of the Malay.
He was ordinarily so calm, so self-contained, so much the example of
the reasoning man and the like, that it seems highly incongruous to
think of him as a duelist; yet twice he challenged to mortal combat. It
appears that under his coolly borne exterior there was fire, and even
his beautiful faith in the supremacy of reason had not eradicated all
the Old Adam from his blood. He seems never to have thought that the
violence he contemplated was nothing but a minute specimen of the
war-making he denounced, nor that in sending challenges he reverted
from his most cherished doctrines. Perhaps if the inconsistency had
been pointed out to him then it would not have disturbed him, and
certainly it is a hobgoblin that need not disturb us now. If the queer
bundle of nerves that is called man never presented a greater
irrelevancy, admiration for him need molt no feather. Both of the
quarrels, if so they might be called, that brought out the fighting
instinct in the gentle artist-student resulted from incidents in Madrid
when he returned there in 1890. W. E. Retana, who had been press-agent
in Manila for the friars, was now a Madrid journalist and printed in
his newspaper a vicious and baseless attack upon Rizal wherein he
sought, doubtless, to revenge the friars on the author of “Noli Me
Tangere.” Without delay Rizal sent him a challenge. Mr. Retana seems to
have had no appetite to go afield; he published a retraction and
apology and the quarrel ended. [147] Rather oddly, Retana, who had been
in Manila the bitter foe of the Filipino cause and of all its champions
(though possibly on a commercial basis), became, after this incident,
first the friend and then the biographer of Rizal.
The other altercation was with Antonio Luna, [148] afterward a famous
commander in the army of the Philippine Republic. About a woman of
Rizal’s acquaintance Luna made an unworthy remark, and Rizal sent him a
challenge. Having possibly regained sobriety meanwhile, Luna withdrew
the remark and apologized for it, whereupon the quarrel was made up
without mortal arbitrament. In his chivalrous and unsullied attitude
toward women Rizal was true to the finest traditions of his race. Among
the faults of the Filipinos, lechery is assuredly not included. Except
the Irish, no other people on earth have a higher conception of
chastity and sex morality, nor adhere to it with greater tenacity.
Retana wrote that Rizal had “a truly upright moral sense.” It was but
an inadequate tribute. He was a champion of righteousness; his religion
was like Wendell Phillips’s, “a battle not a dream.” When he wrote,
“The good of my country, that is all I pursue,” he was not making
platform epigrams but telling what the records confirm.
We have spoken of the purity of his conduct; at least as wonderful is
the fact that he left so little trace of a selfish aim. Other men with
great work to do have had all of his indifference to wealth; what
classifies him as above all these is his far rarer indifference to the
nobler ambitions for fame and power that have beset so many others in
his position and wrecked so many good causes. He sought no place,
looked for no honor, cared for applause as little as finite man could
be expected to care, seemed to have no yearning for ease nor for
pleasure. The lust of the eyes, and that fatal lure, the joy of warming
oneself in the sun of one’s own glory tripped him not. We may admit
that the balance to be drawn from these facts is not wholly a human
figure; one looks for the faults that have disfigured so many other
national heroes and the things that laurel-bearing biographers labor
deftly to conceal. There seems to be nothing to conceal about this man.
And if the tale of his virtues seems at times overwrought so that we
might be relieved to find somewhere that he swore, was easily angered,
or chewed tobacco or fought a cabman, we are to remember that as his
ideals bore him to unusual heights, so it was an unusual condition that
forced him early in life to surrender every purpose but the
emancipation of his country. And when we have made all allowances for
the power of this ambition that swept him along, the fact will remain
and be inevitable in the records that here was a strange figure to walk
in upon us in the nineteenth century from the ends of the earth.
There remains to be noted a singular fact about that leadership of his
people, forced upon him as we have noted, and not of his designing or
plotting. With his prestige and the popularity that was the certain
consequence of a success so gratifying to the hurt national pride, he
had but to make a gesture to his countrymen and they would have
followed him over the smoking ruins of Malacañan or any other place,
fighting with bolos if they could come by no rifles. It was a
temptation to dramatics on the world stage that few men could have
resisted. What reality of stern virtue, worthier of a legendary age
than of his own times, was in this man may be gaged from the fact that
he not so much resisted the temptation as ignored it. Perhaps to him it
was no temptation; at least he may be thought of as living in his inner
and real self, where such things weighed nothing. The time demanded
from a revolutionary leader a proclamation and loud cheers; he met it
with a learned treatise on taxation and how taxation might be improved.
Bitter are the penalties that attend a dark skin! But for his
complexion the world would class him with its purest and best, with
Washington and William the Silent, Phocion and Brutus, Garrison and
Wendell Phillips, and the rest of the scanty band that, having great
tasks thrust upon them, forgot themselves and their tenements of clay
to think only of the Common Good.
As to how José Rizal would stand such a test applied to his career and
all of it, take this testimony of Retana, who from antecedent
probability at least would invent no extravagance of praise. Even in
his youth, said Retana, every injustice, every crime, every wrong,
struck home to his sensibilities. He walked with unsmirched garments
through a world filled with the reek of a sordid time and the cruelty
that man works upon man, trying to make a protest against all
oppressions and busy to the end with the troubles of his fellows but
not with his own.
To this sketch of his moral self, not less engaging than his physical
portraiture, remains to be added one line. Pursued indefatigably by
bigotry and prejudice, he was himself of a singular tolerance. The
wrongs of his people he resented with towering indignation, and his own
he viewed with an astonishing calm. To the gibes and sneers and taunts
of his foes he had but the one habitual response:
“To understand all is to forgive all!”