The hero of the Filipinos The story of José Rizal, poet, patriot and martyr
sway of emotion, and that night haled the unfortunate householder from
his bed. Sometimes the intended victims of these maniacal
manifestations received friendly hints before the blow fell and had
time to flee to the woods, whence they made their way out of the
country, to live, very likely, in the utmost poverty.
Such was the lot, in fact, of most of the men deported. One of them, a
learned lawyer, the ornament of the Philippine bar, as innocent of the
conspiracy as the premier of Spain himself, was twenty years later
picking up the crumbs of a living by trying to practise a little
Spanish law in London. [100]
It is to be assumed that conversation with such men did nothing to
soften Rizal’s spirit or to cool his ardor of service. They were the
living monuments to the hopeless incapacity of the existing System to
govern or to advance. From his days and nights in their company he
passed to Japan, where in the space of one month he achieved the almost
incredible feat of mastering the Japanese language. But for the
testimony of the facts the hardiest biographer would scarce dare the
assertion. Rizal came to Japan with scarce a word of Japanese; he
remained but one month; before he departed he was speaking it so well
that the natives thought he was a countryman of theirs, and he was
acting as their interpreter. Thereafter he could speak and write
Japanese as readily as English or German.
At Hong-Kong he had been somewhat surprised to find himself invited to
the Spanish consulate and urged to abide there. [101] At Tokio this
experience was repeated, the Spanish legation offering him its
hospitality and even suggesting employment as a translator. The
purposes of these advances were clear enough. He was one that the
Government willed, after its custom, to have always under surveillance;
to have him beneath a legation roof was easier and cheaper than to hire
secret service men.
From Yokohama he sailed for San Francisco, astonishing his
fellow-travelers by conversing with all the aliens in their own
tongues, whatever these might be. Among them was a Japanese that knew
not a word of English. Rizal attached himself to this unfortunate and
acted as his interpreter all the way to London.
When he landed at San Francisco, April 28, 1888, his first experiences
under the American flag were hardly calculated to swell his enthusiasm
for the republic. It happened to be a time when a terror of epidemics
was afoot, and he might have reminded himself from what he saw that
sporadic hysteria is not the exclusive possession of the Spaniards nor
of anybody else. What a whisper of insurrection meant to a Spanish
government officer in Manila, a vision of a cholera-germ might signify
to a health-officer in America. The health authorities of San Francisco
were then busily quarantining everything that came into the port. To
them the fact that Rizal’s steamer carried a clean bill of health meant
nothing, nor that she had been properly inspected and cleared at
Yokohama, nor that no disease had developed among her people on the way
over. Who knew what horrent microbes might be lurking in her woodwork
or snugging in the coal-hole? Therefore, authority decreed to hold her
day after day in quarantine while the passengers chafed and fidgeted
and the British among them complained to their consul and threatened an
international scandal. [102]
Rizal seems to have endured the affliction with his customary
philosophy. From the deck he made sketches of the new country that thus
slammed its doors in his face—among them a reproduction of the revenue
flag, with its eagle and perpendicular bars, which he thought was a
novel and taking design. He did not fail to observe, however, that
while the human beings on the steamer were rigidly quarantined the
cargo was unloaded, and he wondered how infection could be carried by
the passengers and not by the freight. When he was released, he went to
the old Palace Hotel in San Francisco and spent several days observing
the strange life of the city. Thence, by train over the mountains,
noting with astonishment how great an area of the country through which
he passed was uninhabited, and apparently being rather entertained than
enraged by the horrors of the American sleeping-car. Two things of much
greater moment impressed him sadly. One was the race prejudice against
the Chinese in San Francisco (then at its height), and the other the
race prejudice against the Negro, manifested in some other parts of the
country.
Afterward he wrote this summary of his swallow flight across the
continent:
I visited the larger cities of America. They have splendid
buildings and magnificent ideals. America is a home-land for the
poor that are willing to work. I traveled across America, and saw
the majestic cascade of Niagara. I was in New York, the great city,
but there everything is new. I went to see some relics of
Washington, that great man who, I fear, has not his equal in this
century.
From Albany he had gone forward by the Hudson River, and was greatly
impressed with its magnificent scenery, but thought that, in the way of
commerce alone, the Pasig was busier. From New York he sailed on the
steamer City of Rome, then esteemed a maritime masterpiece, and reached
London, where he found lodgings with the organist of St. Paul’s
Cathedral and settled himself for a season of work and study.
Part of this work became afterward an invaluable legacy to his
countrymen and literature. In his youth he had heard of a wonderful
book, of which only two or three copies existed in all the world, a
book written in 1607 [103] about the Philippine Islands and their
people as they were then. A blunt, honest old Spaniard, Antonio de
Morga, had written it, apparently with no purpose except to tell the
truth, an impulse that in itself for his times was enough to confer
distinction. Other Spanish writers of that day had written to create
desired impressions, to justify theories or to excuse the Spanish
aggression, whereby the lies had dripped like oil from their pens. De
Morga had as good a chance as anybody else to know the Islands; he had
accompanied one of the earliest of the Spanish expeditions and for
seven years had been a part of its exploits. One of the few copies of
his book, “Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas,” was in the British Museum.
Rizal formed the ambitious design to rescue it from oblivion and
republish it, annotated and clarified.
With some difficulty he ran the barrage so strangely erected around
this institution and found the precious volume to be all that had been
said in praise of it. De Morga’s observations, evidently unbiased,
established what Rizal had long surmised and then asserted, that the
Filipinos had been historically wronged. The sea-coast folk, at least,
the bulk of the nation, had not been more truly savages when Magellan
came than the Spaniards themselves. From de Morga’s accounts it was
easy to show that the Filipino’s spirit, activities, and general
welfare had been in no way bettered by Spanish rule. Arts, industries,
products in the Islands, and even energy, seemed to have been more
observable among the people in de Morga’s day than at the close of the
nineteenth century.
This was a matter of grave importance to the Islanders and so remained
long after Rizal’s labors had ceased. The Spanish excused to the world
their presence and their cruelties alike on the one ground that the
Indio was a savage. Suppose him without European restraint and European
inspiration, they said; he would revert to his caves, his raw meat, and
his bows and arrows. To learn that he was heir to these centuries of
dignity and worth was not only disconcerting but raised a question to
which there was no answer. If he was as civilized as the Spaniard, why
had he not the Spaniard’s right to be free?
De Morga described at length the arts and industries that flourished in
the Philippines long before a Spanish flag had fluttered above their
waters; the excellence in weaving, in metalwork, agriculture,
government, domestic arts, commerce, navigation; how the natives lived
and worked, what good ships they built, what busy marts they had
erected. [104] On this Rizal’s observations are shrewd and witty, but
he sometimes allowed his joy over the vindication of his people and of
his own theories about them to sweep him out of that coolly scientific
attitude he usually maintained about such things. For this he may be
forgiven. He was sensitive, he was proud; he had suffered for the
unjust disparagement of his race; he was dealing with evidence that the
Filipino stock was as good as any other, as much entitled to
development in its own way.
While he was making these studies he found relaxation in athletics. He
screwed together some of his regularly apportioned time to get into the
fields and play. He learned to box and to play cricket; he had long
been an expert fencer. [105] At cricket he was so good that it seems a
pity baseball came so late into his country; it is a game that would
have exactly suited his tastes and inclinings. In the combination of
alert mentality and swift physical action that baseball requires must
be something peculiarly attractive to the Filipino, for do but observe
the astonishing records he has made at it, exciting the admiration of
the most experienced judges. Rizal had never forgotten the training in
physical exercise he had received from his uncle; he still loved to
fence, to ride, to run, to take long, swift walks. His faith was all in
the mental health that is fortified by physical well-being; when all
his mental enginery had been working full tilt he found ease in the
open air, in quick motion and the trees and flowers. His body was as
supple as a wrestler’s, and in support of his theories of reciprocal
mental and physical soundness it is to be remarked that in all his life
he seems never to have been seriously ill.
In London he found congenial company in the household of Dr. Antonio
Regidor, a Filipino that had suffered exile in the Cavite frenzy of
1872. Dr. Regidor had three charming daughters. Rizal’s ideas of life
and conduct may be gathered from the fact that when, after a time, he
discovered that one of these young ladies was forming an attachment for
him, instead of being elated he was much troubled in his mind and
concluded that in such circumstances the best thing he could do was to
take himself out of the young lady’s sight. For once the paths of duty
and expediency fell together. By this time he had completed his work at
the museum and he now departed for Paris.
There, Juan Luna, [106] the Filipino painter, with whom Rizal had
formed a close friendship while both were in Madrid, 1882 to 1885, had
now made his home and Rizal seems to have rejoiced to renew his
associations with his talented countryman. It is certain that the
stupidity of race prejudice, which has so many other and blacker wrongs
to answer for, has deprived this man of a certain part of his just
reward. Yet he was a great painter, the winner of prizes in many
European competitions, and an artist that Paris delighted to honor.
[107] A contemporary and fellow Filipino, Hidalgo, was hardly less
successful; so seldom are their achievements counted in any summary of
the Malay that most unjustly America is still unaware of them. Rizal
usually spent his Sundays in Luna’s studio, sometimes fencing,
sometimes talking art, of which he was still, for all his troubles,
distractions, and complex activities, the steadfast worshiper.
CHAPTER VIII
THE GRAPES OF WRATH
Though all this time out of the sight of his enemies in Manila, he
seems never to have been out of their minds; authoritative evidence