The hero of the Filipinos The story of José Rizal, poet, patriot and martyr
Spanish tradition. Here was innovation—here was danger! In no such vein
were they accustomed to be addressed, and the neuremic espionage that
sustained the existing order seems to have been quick to notice the
novelty. He had been careful to declare with due emphasis his loyalty;
but in every autocracy the uneasy governing class learns first of all
to discount such professions. The poem added to the disfavor in which
the official world held him; his aloofness and studious habits seem to
have multiplied suspicion. A youth with such sentiments and such ways
must be thinking mischief; devilish plottings were irresistibly
suggested. So, then, the blacker the mark against his name! The press
of Manila, all censored, all edited in behalf of the rulers, seems to
have learned early of this proscription. In the stealthy way of the
journalistic prostitute it was already giving Rizal warning. [54]
There were other things in his habits not calculated to give
pleasurable sensations to sedulous supporters of things as they were.
From the beginning of his career at the Ateneo he had taken the
position that the Filipino boys were not to serve as door-mats and
punching-bags for their Spanish fellow-students. He had the courage to
insist upon this principle at whatever cost, which was often the
breaking of his own head. In all years and all conditions it is
character that determines; naturally he became the leader of the
Filipinos in all these encounters and led them without flinching. The
recluse came from his cell at the sound of battle; the student threw
aside schedule and book. He had grown at the Ateneo; he was no longer a
midget; and, having kept up his exercises with the rest of his regimen,
he could hit hard and take punishment. One side or the other was driven
off the field; he contrived to make the retreat a rout if victory sat
upon his banners. “Sir, you have wrestled well, and overthrown more
than your enemies.” One of these conflicts had, as you are presently to
learn, results that he had never counted upon; among them another
shadow on a life already troubled enough.
On March 23, 1876, he received the degree of bachelor of arts with the
highest honors from the Ateneo, and in April, 1877, [55] matriculated
at the ancient university of Santo Tomas. [56] Some of his studies he
continued to pursue at the Ateneo, which he always preferred. The
choice of a career still weighed upon him; in what way of life,
business or profession, could he fit best and furnish the most help? He
looked upon the fertile soil of the Islands, he looked upon the
medieval methods of cultivation in use there, and he half resolved to
be a scientific farmer and show the wonders of which the soil was
capable. He looked upon the general ignorance of the laws of health
among his people and in the end determined to be a physician, choosing
diseases of the eye to be his specialty. Oculists were almost unknown
in the islands, even poor ones; and diseases of the eye were
wide-spread there as in all tropical countries. Every year many
Filipinos went blind whose sight science might easily have saved. For
lack of competent treatment his own mother was likely to share this
dread calamity.
To the profession he had chosen he surrendered nothing of his addiction
to the arts; he modeled, painted, drew, and sang as before. Without
yielding to the extravagant eulogy that has attended his fame in recent
years, it appears certain that he was in art one of those rare
creatures that are endowed at once with two great faculties. He could
create and he could analyze; he could feel and he could reason; and on
either side his activities could be carried on with the same native
ease.
About the time he was entering Santo Tomas the Lyceum staged another
poetic tourney, this time to celebrate the glory of Cervantes. Rizal
was a competitor with an allegory called “The Council of the Gods,” in
which he developed a critical exposition of Cervantes and his art,
lucid, just, and competent; as remarkable a production as the
imaginative part of his work. The awarding of the prizes in this
competition resulted in a painful incident that took its place in the
chain of fateful things now drawing him away. Mystery surrounds the
facts and always will, but it appears that the competitors entered the
lists with assumed names, and that Rizal won the first prize; but when
he was discovered to be a Filipino the laurel was taken from him and
bestowed upon a Spaniard. [57] It was a slash in the old wound; not
even in that domain of art, supposed to have shut doors upon the
prejudices of nation and birth, was the Filipino to be allowed to
forget his inferiority. His fellows at the Ateneo felt that he had been
wronged, and knowledge of the general resentment took nothing from the
ill will with which he was viewed by the governing class. In all lands
it is the fate of the foreign colony to be swayed by puerile emotions;
among these in the Spanish colony of Manila suspicion led all the rest.
Meantime his fate was crying out to him in strange voices that led him,
before he was aware, into the road from the Philippines. At the Ateneo
the students were fond of enacting plays of their own devising. Rizal
was poet and dramatist; here was the plain call to his favorite
pursuit. He wrote for his fellows a metrical drama called “Beside the
Pasig,” and on December 8, 1880, it was publicly performed by one of
the student societies. Courage he had never lacked, the courage of a
mind too reasonable to be deluded by fear. He showed now what he had in
his heart. One of the characters in his drama was the devil himself.
Into the mouth of Sathanas he put (with a dazzling audacity) a sentence
denouncing Spain and her policy toward the Philippines.
There are single colorations of character that sometimes reveal and
illuminate the whole man. This was one of them. Disclosed here was a
certain precise, firm touch of workmanship as typical as was the pluck
demanded to say such a thing. The perfect barbing of the satirical
arrow no Philippine audience could miss; Spain so bad that the devil
himself condemned her! Nothing could be more poisonous. But among the
persons whose attention was enchained by the daring flight of fancy
were members of the Government’s secret service. To keep watch against
such young enthusiasts tempted to raillery upon the existing order was
a chief point in their varied and malign industry, and in this instance
the author of these burning thoughts was no stranger to them. Even if
the bold iconoclast had never shocked right-minded people by calling
the Philippines his fatherland, he must have been from the first an
object of suspicion to the souls that could find sedition in the
drooping of an eyebrow. Brother of Paciano Rizal, son of Francisco
Rizal Mercado, should aught but evil come of that stock? To these
ferrets, his outbreaks in verse must have been no more than the
fulfilment of prophecy.
Then, again, Rizal did not like Santo Tomas. He was galled to think
that its methods of instruction lagged behind those of the Ateneo,
which it should have led. He knew well enough that the cold frown of
hostility was turned upon him by the friar professors. Santo Tomas was
Dominican; the Ateneo was Jesuit. In Rizal’s case jealousy between the
two orders was added to the heavy handicap he must pay as a reputed
insurgent against the System. The Jesuits had sent forth this
prize-winning prodigy. Logically, then, the other orders were
constrained to sniff at him.
He had other encounters with the System that in so many and diverse
ways wearied his people. One night when he was visiting his mother at
Calamba he came, half blinded, out of the lighted house into the
darkness of the street and dimly perceived passing him the figure of a
man. Not knowing who or what it was, Rizal said nothing and made no
movement. With a snarl, the figure turned upon him, whipped out a
sword, and slashed him across the back. It was a Civil Guard—so called.
Rizal’s duty as a Filipino under the barbarous code of the times was to
make a salute whenever he might see one of these strutting persons.
Spaniards need not salute; only Filipinos. If he had known that this
was one of the precious police Rizal would have performed the important
ceremony and so fulfilled his obligation to king and country. As in the
dark the policeman looked like anybody else he thought it hard to be
wounded for not possessing the vision of a cat. The injury was painful
but not serious. When he recovered, he deemed it his duty to report to
the authorities what had occurred. Jeering indifference was all his
reward. An Indio had no rights that a Civil Guard was bound to respect,
and instead of complaining Rizal should be offering thanks that the
offended soldier had not taken his life.
All these experiences must have weighed together, but it was the
political aspect of his plight, no doubt, that decided him. He had set
out in life resolved to win the best education his times and his means
might allow; for himself and more, for his cause much greater than
himself. He now began to see that in his country, and even because of
his love for it, he would be debarred from the knowledge and training
he desired for its sake. Often the sage old counselors had told him to
look abroad for that training, not at home. Most Filipinos that had won
any eminence had first escaped from the evil environment of their
nativity. So long as he could he resisted these arguments. The lost
prize seems to have completed the business for him. He made up his mind
to get the rest of his education abroad.
To go was not so easy as to dream of going. He must have a passport,
and of all men in Manila he was the last to which the Government would
allow that or any other favor; the patriot poet, the singer of the
“fatherland,” the critic of Spain, suspected of sowing treason in the
minds of youths at best none too docile. Through the help of a cousin
and his own ingenuity, he evaded this difficulty and all others. The
cousin got a passport in another name. Paciano and an uncle supplied
funds; [58] a sister gave him a diamond ring to pawn. To outwit
official suspicion, José went to Calamba ostensibly to visit his
family, and really to wait until a vessel should be ready to sail. A
cryptic telegram gave him the warning. He slipped into Manila and after
midnight stole aboard his steamer. When day broke he was well on his
way to Singapore. [59]
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