The hero of the Filipinos The story of José Rizal, poet, patriot and martyr
as easily have been sent; none would satisfy them but this.
At Dapitan were a military station, a convento, and several priests.
Rizal was informed that if he would make a declaration of sympathy and
admiration for Spain he could reside at the convento with the priests.
Even for that privilege, dear to an intellectual man, hungry for the
company of his educated fellows, he would not lay perjury on his soul.
[177] Strange as the temptation seems to us in these days, the tempters
knew well what they had in view. With such a declaration they could
nullify much of Rizal’s influence upon his countrymen and possibly
allay something of the spirit of revolt that on all sides was rising in
the colony.
To the commandant’s house, accordingly, he was assigned. It was but
rude commons and a primitive environment. The sudden and cold plunge
from the place of respect he had held in Europe and his profitable
position in Hong-Kong would have overwhelmed a weaker spirit. Rizal
accepted the stern mutations with the unruffled composure that was
always his strong anchor in whatsoever difficulties. “No man bears
sorrow better,” says the antique Roman of himself; but you would not
look for a recrudescence of Marcus Brutus in a Malay of the nineteenth
century.
In the same spirit he now arranged his time upon a schedule after his
invariable custom, and resumed cheerfully a life of study and work.
Under the parole he had given that he would make no attempt to escape,
he was allowed to go about as he pleased and without observation, for
it is singular that this traitor and dangerous character was implicitly
trusted even by his enemies so far as any question of personal honor
was concerned. He had never a guard in Dapitan. Not only so, but the
commandants, one after another, and all the soldiery, from private to
highest officers, fell under the potent charm of his manner and became
his friends and admirers. The commandants were frequently changed. Each
in turn came to Dapitan warned against the perilous prisoner there and
therefore bristling with dislike; each went away swearing he was the
prince of good fellows and sorry for his fate.
At all times he was the most industrious of exiles; he must have had a
spirit akin to the genius of perpetual motion. Day after day he plunged
into the woods to study the animal life of the region, collect
specimens and write elaborate notes about shells, bugs, crawling
things, trees, and flowers. He explored the coasts of Mindanao and
visited the native villages. With evident enthusiasm he revived his
ethnological pleasures and collected native implements, weapons and
manufactures, many of which from his hands are now in the museum of
Dresden, for instance. [178] True to his natural inclinings, one of his
first employments had been to look about him at the chances the
children of that region had to gain even the rudiments of education.
Finding they had next to nothing, he gathered them about him and began
to teach. He was also busy at times with his professional
ministrations. Patients began to seek him from Manila, from Hong-Kong,
and even from more distant places, so great was his reputation as an
oculist. With the fees they paid him he embarked upon beneficent
enterprises that revealed another reserve in his resourceful mind.
The first of these was a lighting system for Dapitan; the next,
waterworks, which he devised, planned, and superintended in person,
going back to the engineering lore he had learned at the Ateneo and
then laid aside. Much of the construction was difficult, and engineers
still wonder at the skill and courage he showed in meeting its
problems. He and his workmen were without the proper tools; they must
improvise their own materials, and bring the water a long distance over
valleys and around hills; but they conquered every obstacle. [179]
When this task was done he bought him a tract of land close by the
town, built a house on it, and established there adequate quarters for
his school.
This may be a good place to say what this singular person was in some
of the sciences to which he gave so much of himself. As a physician,
while still a student at Madrid University, he had made commentaries of
remarkable merit, “Apuntes de Obstetricia” and “Apuntes Clinicos.” As
an ophthalmologist he seemed to win at once to distinction as soon as
he left the university. This Dr. de Weckert of Paris, to whom he went
first, was of too great repute and too well supplied with candidates to
have selected him for chief laboratory assistant if he had not been of
unusual attainments. It appears that de Weckert was so much impressed
with this brown man from Malaya that they began a warm friendship that
lasted until Rizal’s death, and so long as he remained in Paris he was
the great oculist’s favorite companion and collaborateur. In
Heidelberg, Leipzig, and Berlin he was the associate and assistant of
men like Galezowsky and Schulzer. In the few months that elapsed
between his first return to the Philippines and his departure thence at
the veiled order of Terrero, he received in fees more than five
thousand pesos, a sum equivalent to about fifteen thousand pesos of the
present day. At Hong-Kong, for the short time he was there, his office
was overrun with patients from all that part of the world. As we have
seen, they followed him even to far Dapitan. One of them was an
Englishman that made him a present of five hundred pesos, brown man and
Malay as he was.
As an ethnologist, he was an honored member of the leading ethnological
societies of Europe, and his close friendship with Blumentritt we have
noted. Dr. Meyer, director of the Royal Saxony Ethnographical Institute
of Dresden, regarded him with admiration as a great scholar and great
investigator. With Meyer and with Virchow he was on terms of
confidential intimacy. These were men in whom ordinarily confidence was
a plant of slow growth. They were drawn to and believed in Rizal
because he had mastered their specialty and could meet them in it on
their own footing. All those rare and abstruse works of Müller,
Perschel, Ratzel, and the other great leaders in ethnological research
he knew well [180] and, what was better, he had ideas of his own about
them. Not only then but long before; he had been mulling over
ethnological principles while he was teaching Filipino boys at the
Ateneo the best way to land on the solar plexus of a young Spanish
bully.
As a naturalist he enriched the museums of Europe and Manila with
hundreds of specimens of his gathering and preparing. Flowers, plants,
crustaceans and all forms of animal life attracted his study. The
German museums were so well pleased with his work that they offered
him, while he was in Dapitan, a remunerative salary to devote himself
entirely to gathering specimens for them, and they still exhibit his
collections among their most valued possessions. Three creatures,
previously unknown to science, now bear his name because he discovered
them. One is a frog called the Rhacoperus Rizali; the second is a
coleopter called the Apogonis Rizali; and the third, a dragon called
the Draco Rizali.
In philology, Rizal won the friendship and esteem of Dr. Reinhold Rost,
said to have been the greatest philologist of the nineteenth century,
and was himself one of its most wonderful polyglots. While he was at
Dapitan, to baffle the censor, he wrote a letter to his sister that he
began in colloquial German, carried on in colloquial English, and
concluded in colloquial French. [181] But this was for him a most
trifling exploit and hardly worth noticing. Besides these and Spanish,
of which he was a master, he spoke Latin, Greek, Arab, Sanskrit,
Hebrew, Swedish, Dutch, Catalan, Italian, Chinese, Japanese,
Portuguese, Russian, Tagalog, Visayan, and the Moro dialects of
Dapitan. One of his papers, a scientific treatise on the Visayan
language, was read before the Ethnographical Society of Berlin. He was
associated with Dr. Meyer and Dr. Blumentritt in the annotation of a
Chinese codicil of the Middle Ages. While at Dapitan he began to write
a scientific Tagalog grammar and a treatise on the resemblances between
Tagalog and Visayan speech. To amuse himself he would sometimes adorn a
title-page or drawing with quotations in Hebrew, Sanskrit, Japanese,
Spanish, and English.
As to other sciences, for example, he excelled in chemistry. Before he
was twenty-one he had obtained degrees as surveyor and agricultural
expert. He was an excellent engineer and so scientific an educator that
when the Philippine Republic came to be erected the plan of the
educational department and work was taken from his writings. In Leipzig
he went deeply into psychology, in which he was fellow-student with
Hugo Münsterberg. While he was at Dapitan he learned how to sail a
ship, and taught their trade to the fishermen, because he showed them
how to make and how to handle a better kind of net.
Incidentally, he had the makings of a great journalist.
Concerning his place as a poet, most of his poetry was written in
Spanish and after the approved Spanish manner. Like other poetry it is
virtually incapable of translation. The thought may be indicated but
not the melodic significance, so important in Spanish, and of which he
was a facile master. How impossible it is to reproduce this in
translation is apparent to one that will compare the five-line Spanish
stanza as Rizal left it and the best English version of the same
stanza. A poem that he wrote at Dapitan, “My Retreat,” [182] dedicated
to his mother, is an adequate expression of the reverent attitude
toward nature that he managed to carry with him unimpaired in so many
vicissitudes and long inhumations in the sordid dust of cities. This is
the first stanza in Mr. Derbyshire’s version: [183]
By the spreading beach where the sands are soft and fine,
At the foot of the mount in its mantle of green,
I have built my hut in the pleasant grove’s confine
From the forest seeking peace and a calmness divine,
Rest for the weary brain and silence to my sorrow keen.
From poetry, we pass to sociology, a transition that might seem violent
enough in one of less versatility. The commandants, of course, must be
parts of the general machinery of espionage and report to Manila what
they observed in this evil sprite that might show dangerous
machinations against the peace and dignity of our lord the king. Some
of the reports they made are still extant. One of them sent about this
time by a commandant, the Captain Ricardo Carnicero, to
Governor-General Despujol contains this account of a conversation:
Carnicero. Tell me, Rizal, what reforms seem to you most vital for
this country?
Rizal. First of all, to secure representation for it in the Cortes
[Spanish parliament] that there may be an end to the despotisms now
committed upon it.
Next to secularize the priesthood, [184] abolishing the power the
friars now exercise over the Government and the country. To
distribute the parishes as they become vacant, among the body of
the clergy, so that the clergy may be both Spanish and Philippine.
To reform the administration in all its branches.
To promote primary instruction, to end the interference of the
friars in the control of education, to give better salaries to both
men and women teachers.
To divide civil appointments equally between the Spaniards and the
Filipinos.
To cleanse the administration of justice.
To establish in capitals of more than 16,000 inhabitants schools of
arts and crafts.
These are my chief reforms. Once established in the right spirit,
the Philippines would be the happiest country in the world.