Lineage, Life and Labors of José Rizal, Philippine Patriot
to it in May, 1889, some specimens of Tagal folklore, an extract from
which is appended, as it was then printed:
Specimens of Tagal Folklore
By Doctor J. Rizal
Proverbial Sayings
Malakas ang bulong sa sigaw, Low words are stronger than loud words.
Ang laki sa layaw karaniwa 'y hubad, A petted child is generally naked
(i.e. poor).
Hampasng magulang ay nakataba, Parents' punishment makes one fat.
Ibang hari ibang ugail, New king, new fashion.
Nagpuputol ang kapus, ang labis ay nagdurugtong, What is short cuts
off a piece from itself, what is long adds another on (the poor gets
poorer, the rich richer).
Ang nagsasabing tapus ay siyang kinakapus, He who finishes his words
finds himself wanting.
Nangangako habang napapako, Man promises while in need.
Ang naglalakad ng marahan, matinik may mababaw, He who walks slowly,
though he may put his foot on a thorn, will not be hurt very much
(Tagals mostly go barefooted).
Ang maniwala sa sabi 'y walang bait na sarili, He who believes in
tales has no own mind.
Ang may isinuksok sa dingding, ay may titingalain, He who has put
something between the wall may afterwards look on (the saving man
may afterwards be cheerful).--The wall of a Tagal house is made of
palm-leaves and bamboo, so that it can be used as a cupboard.
Walang mahirap gisingin na paris nang nagtutulogtulugan, The most
difficult to rouse from sleep is the man who pretends to be asleep.
Labis sa salita, kapus sa gawa, Too many words, too little work.
Hipong tulog ay nadadala ng anod, The sleeping shrimp is carried away
by the current.
Sa bibig nahuhuli ang isda, The fish is caught through the mouth.
Puzzles
Isang butil na palay sikip sa buony bahay, One rice-corn fills up
all the house.--The light. The rice-corn with the husk is yellowish.
Matapang ako so dalawa, duag ako sa isa, I am brave against two,
coward against one.--The bamboo bridge. When the bridge is made of
one bamboo only, it is difficult to pass over; but when it is made
of two or more, it is very easy.
Dala ako niya, dala ko siya, He carries me, I carry him.--The shoes.
Isang balong malalim puna ng patalim, A deep well filled with steel
blades.--The mouth.
The Filipino colony in Spain had established a fortnightly review,
published first in Barcelona and later in Madrid, to enlighten
Spaniards on their distant colony, and Rizal wrote for it from the
start. Its name, La Solidaridad, perhaps may be translated Equal
Rights, as it aimed at like laws and the same privileges for the
Peninsula and the possessions overseas.
From the Philippines came news of a contemptible attempt to reach
Rizal through his family--one of many similar petty persecutions. His
sister Lucia's husband had died and the corpse was refused interment
in consecrated ground, upon the pretext that the dead man, who had been
exceptionally liberal to the church and was of unimpeachable character,
had been negligent in his religious duties. Another individual with
a notorious record of longer absence from confession died about
the same time, and his funeral took place from the church without
demur. The ugly feature about the refusal to bury Hervosa was that the
telegram from the friar parish-priest to the Archbishop at Manila in
asking instructions, was careful to mention that the deceased was a
brother-in-law of Rizal. Doctor Rizal wrote a scorching article for
La Solidaridad under the caption "An Outrage," and took the matter
up with the Spanish Colonial Minister, then Becerra, a professed
Liberal. But that weakling statesman, more liberal in words than in
actions, did nothing.
That the union of Church and State can be as demoralizing to religion
as it is disastrous to good government seems sufficiently established
by Philippine incidents like this, in which politics was substituted
for piety as the test of a good Catholic, making marriage impossible
and denying decent burial to the families of those who differed
politically with the ministers of the national religion.
Of all his writings, the article in which Rizal speaks of this
indignity to the dead comes nearest to exhibiting personal feeling and
rancor. Yet his main point is to indicate generally what monstrous
conditions the Philippine mixture of religion and politics made
possible.
The following are part of a series of nineteen verses published in
La Solidaridad over Rizal's favorite pen name of Laong Laan:
To my Muse
(translation by Charles Derbyshire)
Invoked no longer is the Muse,
The lyre is out of date;
The poets it no longer use,
And youth its inspiration now imbues
With other form and state.
If today our fancies aught
Of verse would still require,
Helicon's hill remains unsought;
And without heed we but inquire,
Why the coffee is not brought.
In the place of thought sincere
That our hearts may feel,
We must seize a pen of steel,
And with verse and line severe
Fling abroad a jest and jeer.
Muse, that in the past inspired me,
And with songs of love hast fired me;
Go thou now to dull repose,
For today in sordid prose
I must earn the gold that hired me.
Now must I ponder deep,
Meditate, and struggle on;
E'en sometimes I must weep;
For he who love would keep
Great pain has undergone.
Fled are the days of ease,
The days of Love's delight;
When flowers still would please
And give to suffering souls surcease
From pain and sorrow's blight.
One by one they have passed on,
All I loved and moved among;
Dead or married--from me gone,
For all I place my heart upon
By fate adverse are stung.
Go thou, too, O Muse, depart,
Other regions fairer find;
For my land but offers art
For the laurel, chains that bind,
For a temple, prisons blind.
But before thou leavest me, speak:
Tell me with thy voice sublime,
Thou couldst ever from me seek
A song of sorrow for the weak,
Defiance to the tyrant's crime.
Rizal's congenial situation in the British capital was disturbed
by his discovering a growing interest in the youngest of the three
girls whom he daily met. He felt that his career did not permit him
to marry, nor was his youthful affection for his cousin in Manila an
entirely forgotten sentiment. Besides, though he never lapsed into
such disregard for his feminine friends as the low Spanish standard
had made too common among the Filipino students in Madrid, Rizal was
ever on his guard against himself. So he suggested to Doctor Regidor
that he considered it would be better for him to leave London. His
parting gift to the family with whom he had lived so happily was a
clay medallion bearing in relief the profiles of the three sisters.
Other regretful good-bys were said to a number of young Filipinos
whom he had gathered around him and formed into a club for the study
of the history of their country and the discussion of its politics.
Rizal now went to Paris, where he was glad to be again with his friend
Valentin Ventura, a wealthy Pampangan who had been trained for the
law. His tastes and ideals were very much those of Rizal, and he had
sound sense and a freedom from affectation which especially appealed
to Rizal. There Rizal's reprint of Morga's rare history was made, at
a greater cost but also in better form than his first novel. Copious
notes gave references to other authorities and compared present
with past conditions, and Doctor Blumentritt contributed a forceful
introduction.
When Rizal returned to London to correct the proofsheets, the old
original book was in use and the copy could not be checked. This led to
a number of errors, misspelled and changed words, and even omissions
of sentences, which were afterwards discovered and carefully listed
and filed away to be corrected in another edition.
Possibly it has been made clear already that, while Rizal did not
work for separation from Spain, he was no admirer of the Castilian
character, nor of the Latin type, for that matter. He remarked on
Blumentritt's comparison of the Spanish rulers in the Philippines
with the Czars of Russia, that it is flattering to the Castilians
but it is more than they merit, to put them in the same class as
Russia. Apparently he had in mind the somewhat similar comparison in
Burke's speech on the conciliation of America, in which he said that
Russia was more advanced and less cruel than Spain and so not to be
classed with it.
During his stay in Paris, Rizal was a frequent visitor at the home
of the two Doctors Pardo de Tavera, sons of the exile of '72 who
had gone to France, the younger now a physician in South America,
the elder a former Philippine Commissioner. The interest of the
one in art, and of the other in philology, the ideas of progress
through education shared by both, and many other common tastes and
ideals, made the two young men fast friends of Rizal. Mrs. Tavera,
the mother, was an interesting conversationalist, and Rizal profited
by her reminiscences of Philippine official life, to the inner circle
of which her husband's position had given her the entree.
On Sundays Rizal fenced at Juan Luna's house with his distinguished
artist-countryman, or, while the latter was engaged with Ventura,
watched their play. It was on one of these afternoons that the Tagalog
story of "The Monkey and the Tortoise"[2] was hastily sketched as a
joke to fill the remaining pages of Mrs. Luna's autograph album, in
which she had been insisting Rizal must write before all its space
was used up. A comparison of the Tagalog version with a Japanese
counterpart was published by Rizal in English, in Truebner's Magazine,
suggesting that the two people may have had a common origin. This
study received considerable attention from other ethnologists, and
was among the topics at an ethnological conference.
At times his antagonist was Miss Nellie Baustead, who had great
skill with the foils. Her father, himself born in the Philippines,
the son of a wealthy merchant of Singapore, had married a member of
the Genato family of Manila. At their villa in Biarritz, and again
in their home in Belgium, Rizal was a guest later, for Mr. Baustead
had taken a great liking to him.
The teaching instinct that led him to act as mentor to the Filipino
students in Spain and made him the inspiration of a mutual improvement
club of his young countrymen in London, suggested the foundation of
a school in Paris. Later a Pampangan youth offered him $40,000 with
which to found a Filipino college in Hongkong, where many young men
from the Philippines had obtained an education better than their
own land could afford but not entirely adapted to their needs. The
scheme attracted Rizal, and a prospectus for such an institution
which was later found among his papers not only proves how deeply
he was interested, but reveals the fact that his ideas of education
were essentially like those carried out in the present public-school
course of instruction in the Philippines.
Early in August of 1890 Rizal went to Madrid to seek redress for a
wrong done his family by the notorious General Weyler, the "Butcher"
of evil memory in Cuba, then Governor-General of the Philippines. Just
as the mother's loss of liberty, years before, was caused by revengeful
feelings on the part of an official because for one day she was obliged
to omit a customary gift of horse feed, so the father's loss of land
was caused by a revengeful official, and for quite as trivial a cause.
Mr. Mercado was a great poultry fancier and especially prided himself
upon his fine stock of turkeys. He had been accustomed to respond to
the frequent requests of the estate agent for presents of birds. But
at one time disease had so reduced the number of turkeys that all that