The hero of the Filipinos The story of José Rizal, poet, patriot and martyr

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