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