The hero of the Filipinos The story of José Rizal, poet, patriot and martyr
communicate its impressions.... The result of this is that if a
prejudicial measure is ordered, no one protests: all goes well
apparently until later the evils are felt. Another blood-letting and as
the organism has neither nerves nor voice the physician proceeds in the
belief that the treatment is not injuring it. It needs a reform, but as
it must not speak, it keeps silent and remains with the need.” [141]
Thus of the possible contribution of these people the world was
deprived because a grotesquely unintelligent tyranny stifled the
expression of their natural forces. It is the office of absolutism to
try to make men think alike. This absolutism tried to keep them from
thinking at all.
Once the Filipino was active, alert, industrious, prosperous. Now he
had become inert, often inept, indifferent, poor. For these
transformations, behold here the reasons. They are enough.
With more than one purpose we have dwelt at length upon this remarkable
treatise. It shows Rizal’s mind, how clear and strong, and his
thinking, how firm and sure. It shows how logically he arranged his
ideas to a climax, a faculty that marks all his writings. It shows how
well based upon reading and reason, no less than upon observation, was
his faith in the Filipino people. Not from mere instinct nor from
racial prejudice, he felt that here was a great and suppressed power.
We dwell upon it also because it offers an unequaled picture of the
Philippines after three hundred years of alien rule and indicates the
appalling boundaries of the task that he had single-handed undertaken.
Courage is the quality that mankind has elected most to honor. Surely
the courage of battle-fields is little compared with the supreme
courage of a man that looking level-eyed upon such terrific
difficulties as are outlined here sets himself to the one business of
combating and overcoming them.
One other reflection pertains to this chapter, profoundly suggestive to
any mind that will give heed to it. After all these generations of a
system so elaborately designed to annihilate their spirits and
chloroform their energies, the Malays of the Islands were still
unerased. A few years after Rizal’s so able plea for them had been
written they were in arms beating back the best troops of the
oppressor. Thirty years later, under changed auspices, they were giving
to the world a conspicuous example of intelligent and successful
self-government. No sooner was applied to them the stimulus of a
measure of freedom than the old reproach of indolence began to fail.
In thirty years they had demonstrated the truth of all this man had
said of them. Sympathetic insight proved to be better than the solemn
platitudes of wise men reasoning backward. As you see the Filipino now,
said the wise men, so he must be always. Indolence—it is of the race
and incurable! With a dash of his pen Rizal sent all this seven ways.
He knew the heart of Filipinas; the wise men knew only what had been
written by somebody who had read what somebody else had deduced about
her.
CHAPTER XI
WHAT MANNER OF MAN
More than the persecutions launched against his family disturbed Rizal
in the news he was receiving now from Manila. The fire of discontent
was rising among the people of the Philippines; the letters of his
friends foreshadowed an explosion. Not revolution by peaceful means was
at hand but another civil war. He determined to go to Madrid that he
might talk with the Filipinos there about these storm-signals and at
the same time lodge with the Spanish Government a formal protest
against the eviction of the family from its Calamba property.
At Madrid he found the situation much changed in the five years of his
absence. In the Filipino colony the feeling had gained that from such a
Government nothing was to be won by appeals and agitation. For an
illustration men pointed to Cuba. Petitions, reasonings, arguments,
beseechings wrought nothing. Whatever Cuba had gained was tribute to
its sword. Against this Rizal still counseled. Even in such a crisis he
could not rid his mind of the doctrine of fitness for self-government,
and so long as he reasoned more than he allowed himself to feel, he
could not compromise with his overmastering horror of war.
In this, again, he had outstripped the current thought of his age. A
world without war was then the dream of a few enthusiasts, looking to
another generation or to some mystic transformation in the chemistry of
human blood; what were called practical men went on devising new
torpedoes and more powerful explosives for the next conflict. In his
own way, different from theirs, he was himself as truly a practical man
as ever lived, and a warless humanity was no dream to him; he thought
he could see it close at hand. He thought he could see his fellow-men
of all lands surrendering the lunacy of combat for a rational
settlement of international troubles by agreement and arbitration. Out
of the reflexes of his own thought and spirit he was instructed that
the hour for this transformation had come.
Up to that time, certainly, the lessons of history, his favorite study,
were against him. There can be no doubt that a condition of oppression
or general injustice is in essence a condition of violence, and so far
in the human story half-emancipated man has found no way to end one
condition of violence except by means of another. “It will have blood,
they say, blood will have blood,” might have been written across the
gates of every house of tyranny. The hope that the frightful wrongs
laid upon the Filipinos could be an exception to this primordial rule
was alluring to a soul like Rizal’s. We can see now that in the
existing stage of civilization it was no better founded than the other
deceptive notion that the sufferings of the common people of France
under the Ancient Régime could have had any result but retribution in
kind. As a matter of strict fact, the Reign of Terror was established
years before Dr. Guillotin thought of his device of “a certain movable
framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history.” It was
in reality assured by the fathers of many innocent and well meaning
ladies and gentlemen whose heads it rolled into the Seine—a painful
thought, but historically indisputable. The fierce philosophy of these
records Rizal could not assimilate; the poet in him revolted at the
ugliness of hatred; he had too genuine a love of his own kind to
tolerate cruelty. Whether in the mass or toward individuals he could
not endure it. These seem to constitute the only set of facts his mind
was unable to absorb. He could in four weeks master a language and
could not in a lifetime well comprehend the caveman’s logic of blows.
This amiable strabismus half blinded him to what was really impending
in his own country. The truth was that the System was slowly forcing a
revolt there; not intentionally, but after the manner of all drunken
power. To lay bare the iniquities of that System was to send against it
the torch and ax. Every page of “Noli Me Tangere” was in effect a call
to battle. He never suspected this, but fact it was nevertheless. To
imagine, as he at one time imagined, that intrenched greed would
without a struggle surrender its privileges and lay by the cracking of
its whips was to imagine that which never was nor shall be. The
reversion to primitive standards was inaugurated, not by Filipino
revolutionists, but by the System itself, which, denying justice, left
to the harassed multitudes nothing but revolution.
At this crux of his story, when he appeared at Madrid as the champion
of an impossible peace, and the eyes and hearts of all his countrymen
were turning to him, the time may be good to describe the man that had
already wielded so tremendous a power.
He was then in his thirty-first year. The first impression one had of
him was of wholesome vigor and physical well-being. He was of rather
slender build, but all of muscle and sinew compact, for he never
remitted his exercises. In height, he was five feet, four inches;
coming of what seems to Occidental eyes an undersized people. From long
hours at his desk he had contracted a slight stoop. His handsome face
retained its fine boyish oval, but rugged character and unshakable
firmness were now stamped upon it, and an expression of melancholy. His
eyes were still remarked for their brightness. His hands were small and
shapely, his feet noticeably small. [142]
His voice was low in pitch, of a noble tonality, and so strangely
vibrant that one hearing it at its best never forgot it. One of his
rules was never to raise it; he spoke always with an identical
restraint. With such a voice and with his flow of apt and picturesque
language he was equipped for public speaking, in which he had made on
several occasions a rather marked success; yet he always thought
lightly of the art of oratory and refused to pursue it.
Whether among his friends or in his writings he had ordinarily little
to say about himself, and there is but one recorded instance when he
seemed to give way to the bitter recollections that must at times have
assailed him. On this occasion he said to a friend in London with whom
he was walking:
“I have traveled around the world. I have studied the important nations
by personal and direct observation. I have noted well all the races
that have contributed to human progress. I speak all their languages
and others. And yet,” he added with a melancholy smile, “I am to the
friars merely a vulgar half-breed.”
At Madrid, one of his intimates from the Islands was Teodoro Sandiko,
later to be a leader among his people and an honored member of the
Philippine Senate. In a letter recalling their association, Senator
Sandiko once wrote: [143]
Rizal was fond of physical exercise and so was I. We practised
fencing together and soon became good and close friends.
He was simple in his manners, but profound in his studies and
researches, analytical in his mental processes, reflective rather
than sentimental. He was extremely methodical and industrious; I
never saw him idle. He had great confidence in himself, was firm in
his faith, resourceful in the solving of a difficult situation,
swift and sure in his decisions. His habit was to answer without
hesitation and succinctly any question that might be put to him; he
had never to hunt for an idea or a word. He was the most loyal of
friends; anything he possessed was at his friend’s disposal. He was
courteous, affectionate, affable, sincere, but rather serious. His
mental state may be judged from the mass of material he contributed
to “La Solidaridad,” so varied, so forceful and so carefully
prepared.
Wherever he went, he seemed without effort to make friends of all men
that came near him. Set down in a steamer full of strangers, he would
be noted at once by every passenger and before dinner was served would
be on good terms with most of the persons on board, crew included. Yet,
strange to say, he seldom smiled, usually seemed distrait in the midst
of others’ mirth, and was sometimes lost in gloomy musing, when he
seemed all unaware of his surroundings. In the opinion of his friends,
he had almost no self-consciousness; certainly, all his life he hated
affectations and never lost a chance to scorch them with his terrible
sarcasm; for this man of the world, ordinarily so suave and courteous
that he won good will even among his enemies, had certain reserve funds
of censuring speech he could make as bitter as gall. Whether he sat,
walked, stood, talked, or listened he was always natural, always
composed, and always the sure master of himself. When he went through
the United States he noticed that the men there conversed without