The hero of the Filipinos The story of José Rizal, poet, patriot and martyr
gesticulating, contrary to the practice of the Spaniards and most
Europeans. On reflection he deemed the practice to lend strength to
utterance and thereafter made it a rule to keep his hands still while
he talked.
The image of a man that seldom smiled and yet so easily won his fellows
to like him seems out of the drawing of nature and yet in this case is
essentially true. There was in Rizal’s face something almost
irresistibly winning. Good will looked out of it and warm human
sympathy and a kind of downright sincerity that found a way to the
notice of even the dullest. It seemed to one studying him attentively
that on the original lines of a being all love, gentleness, and
meditation had been stamped later a great melancholy and a great and
high resolve. Lowly men seemed to understand instinctively something in
him they could never have formulated nor described, something friendly
and good; and men of learning turned with a similar impulse to a mind
that showed itself so wealthy and still so unpretending.
He loved music, was a good judge of it, and composed it readily and
well. He loved flowers as all other things beautiful—of course, being
an artist born and the instinct ineradicable in him! That charming poem
of his, “The Flowers of Heidelberg” [144] was written in the intervals
between his pursuits of the most advanced discoveries and driest facts
in ophthalmology, surgery, ethnology, entomology, anthropology, and the
penning of some of the fiercest passages of condensed wrath to be found
in any language. It is likely that he saw nothing grotesque in these
abrupt transitions; perfectly sincere men have little time for such
nice questionings. If we regard the making of poetry as the serious
business of his soul, which it was, his chief intellectual relaxation
was chess, of which, by the time of his second visit to Madrid, he had
become a notable player. [145]
He had as little vanity as any man conscious of his powers could
reasonably have. Yet he was always careful of his appearance and took
pains to dress well, after the most modest taste. Even when he was
poverty-stricken in Berlin and living on a daily bowl of coffee and
piece of bread, he would allow himself no laxity in his attire.
Once he wrote of some pupils of his that he was teaching them to behave
like men. [146] It was a point of weight with him. His conception of a
man was one that had at all times himself in full command. This virtue
he had practised assiduously from those old days at the Ateneo when
first he perceived its splendors; and now he was so truly captain of
his own soul that, as we have seen, he could endure privations, subdue
appetites, and urge himself along his road by the sheer force of his
will. He was the greater part of his life desperately poor; yet if he
had been willing to practise his profession for gain a great fortune
was within his grasp. In whatsoever conditions he found himself he
still tried to adhere to that plan he had adopted at the Ateneo of
apportioning his day according to a schedule. He was more careful of
his time than a miser of his gold; he would waste no hour. To his
friends he admitted that when he sat silent in company and seemed to be
moody he was composing his next article for “La Solidaridad” or a new
chapter in one of his books. He was the least superstitious of men, but
for years he had a presentiment that he would die by shooting. Once
crossing Bagumbayan Field he pointed to the place of execution and said
to a companion, “On that spot I shall some day be put to death by a
firing-squad.” As a final light upon a singular character, it is to be
noted that he was not oppressed by this foreboding. It was accompanied
in his mind, as nearly as one can discern, with a conviction that the
cause for which he stood must have its victims, and to this extent and
no farther showed in him the fatalism supposed to be a distinctive
trait of the Malay.
He was ordinarily so calm, so self-contained, so much the example of
the reasoning man and the like, that it seems highly incongruous to
think of him as a duelist; yet twice he challenged to mortal combat. It
appears that under his coolly borne exterior there was fire, and even
his beautiful faith in the supremacy of reason had not eradicated all
the Old Adam from his blood. He seems never to have thought that the
violence he contemplated was nothing but a minute specimen of the
war-making he denounced, nor that in sending challenges he reverted
from his most cherished doctrines. Perhaps if the inconsistency had
been pointed out to him then it would not have disturbed him, and
certainly it is a hobgoblin that need not disturb us now. If the queer
bundle of nerves that is called man never presented a greater
irrelevancy, admiration for him need molt no feather. Both of the
quarrels, if so they might be called, that brought out the fighting
instinct in the gentle artist-student resulted from incidents in Madrid
when he returned there in 1890. W. E. Retana, who had been press-agent
in Manila for the friars, was now a Madrid journalist and printed in
his newspaper a vicious and baseless attack upon Rizal wherein he
sought, doubtless, to revenge the friars on the author of “Noli Me
Tangere.” Without delay Rizal sent him a challenge. Mr. Retana seems to
have had no appetite to go afield; he published a retraction and
apology and the quarrel ended. [147] Rather oddly, Retana, who had been
in Manila the bitter foe of the Filipino cause and of all its champions
(though possibly on a commercial basis), became, after this incident,
first the friend and then the biographer of Rizal.
The other altercation was with Antonio Luna, [148] afterward a famous
commander in the army of the Philippine Republic. About a woman of
Rizal’s acquaintance Luna made an unworthy remark, and Rizal sent him a
challenge. Having possibly regained sobriety meanwhile, Luna withdrew
the remark and apologized for it, whereupon the quarrel was made up
without mortal arbitrament. In his chivalrous and unsullied attitude
toward women Rizal was true to the finest traditions of his race. Among
the faults of the Filipinos, lechery is assuredly not included. Except
the Irish, no other people on earth have a higher conception of
chastity and sex morality, nor adhere to it with greater tenacity.
Retana wrote that Rizal had “a truly upright moral sense.” It was but
an inadequate tribute. He was a champion of righteousness; his religion
was like Wendell Phillips’s, “a battle not a dream.” When he wrote,
“The good of my country, that is all I pursue,” he was not making
platform epigrams but telling what the records confirm.
We have spoken of the purity of his conduct; at least as wonderful is
the fact that he left so little trace of a selfish aim. Other men with
great work to do have had all of his indifference to wealth; what
classifies him as above all these is his far rarer indifference to the
nobler ambitions for fame and power that have beset so many others in
his position and wrecked so many good causes. He sought no place,
looked for no honor, cared for applause as little as finite man could
be expected to care, seemed to have no yearning for ease nor for
pleasure. The lust of the eyes, and that fatal lure, the joy of warming
oneself in the sun of one’s own glory tripped him not. We may admit
that the balance to be drawn from these facts is not wholly a human
figure; one looks for the faults that have disfigured so many other
national heroes and the things that laurel-bearing biographers labor
deftly to conceal. There seems to be nothing to conceal about this man.
And if the tale of his virtues seems at times overwrought so that we
might be relieved to find somewhere that he swore, was easily angered,
or chewed tobacco or fought a cabman, we are to remember that as his
ideals bore him to unusual heights, so it was an unusual condition that
forced him early in life to surrender every purpose but the
emancipation of his country. And when we have made all allowances for
the power of this ambition that swept him along, the fact will remain
and be inevitable in the records that here was a strange figure to walk
in upon us in the nineteenth century from the ends of the earth.
There remains to be noted a singular fact about that leadership of his
people, forced upon him as we have noted, and not of his designing or
plotting. With his prestige and the popularity that was the certain
consequence of a success so gratifying to the hurt national pride, he
had but to make a gesture to his countrymen and they would have
followed him over the smoking ruins of Malacañan or any other place,
fighting with bolos if they could come by no rifles. It was a
temptation to dramatics on the world stage that few men could have
resisted. What reality of stern virtue, worthier of a legendary age
than of his own times, was in this man may be gaged from the fact that
he not so much resisted the temptation as ignored it. Perhaps to him it
was no temptation; at least he may be thought of as living in his inner
and real self, where such things weighed nothing. The time demanded
from a revolutionary leader a proclamation and loud cheers; he met it
with a learned treatise on taxation and how taxation might be improved.
Bitter are the penalties that attend a dark skin! But for his
complexion the world would class him with its purest and best, with
Washington and William the Silent, Phocion and Brutus, Garrison and
Wendell Phillips, and the rest of the scanty band that, having great
tasks thrust upon them, forgot themselves and their tenements of clay
to think only of the Common Good.
As to how José Rizal would stand such a test applied to his career and
all of it, take this testimony of Retana, who from antecedent
probability at least would invent no extravagance of praise. Even in
his youth, said Retana, every injustice, every crime, every wrong,
struck home to his sensibilities. He walked with unsmirched garments
through a world filled with the reek of a sordid time and the cruelty
that man works upon man, trying to make a protest against all
oppressions and busy to the end with the troubles of his fellows but
not with his own.
To this sketch of his moral self, not less engaging than his physical
portraiture, remains to be added one line. Pursued indefatigably by
bigotry and prejudice, he was himself of a singular tolerance. The
wrongs of his people he resented with towering indignation, and his own
he viewed with an astonishing calm. To the gibes and sneers and taunts
of his foes he had but the one habitual response:
“To understand all is to forgive all!”
CHAPTER XII
“EL FILIBUSTERISMO”
For Spanish or Filipino ears, “filibuster” has nothing of the comic or
disreputable suggestion that it bears to the American. In the
Philippines of Rizal’s day it denoted a person opposed to the existing
régime, an insurgent, whether advocating peaceful or violent means of
separation from Spain. “El Filibusterismo” means a movement for
Philippine independence.
In this novel again, the chief figure is Ibarra, the hero of “Noli Me
Tangere.” It was Elias, not Ibarra, that was struck with the bullets of
the Civil Guards when they were pursuing his banca; Ibarra escaped
unhurt. He made his way out of the country and now returns after some
years, disguised and under an assumed name, to seek the revenge upon
which all this time his heart has been brooding. The difference between
the Ibarra that refused Elias’ prayer to lead the people and this
Ibarra become now hopeless of any peaceful remedy betrays once more the
change we have already noted as coming over Rizal’s most cherished
convictions and in spite of himself. A struggle was going on between