CHAPTER IV

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.”

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