The hero of the Filipinos The story of José Rizal, poet, patriot and martyr
all, conditions that determined whether men should climb or remain, and
not blood nor the color of skin nor the texture of hair.
It appears that he would make full allowance for individuals of unusual
gifts, for the Shakespeares and Hugos, Goethes and Voltaires. What he
was considering was men in the mass, not individuals. If we may judge
from his writings and the testimony of his friends he was singularly
free from vanity; certainly from the little vanities of self-seekers.
He could hardly have failed to perceive even then that he himself was
of the order of the exceptional; at the same time he saw plainly enough
that his own attainments were won by hard and systematic toil rather
than the rare blessings of the gods dropped into his lap. Still looking
upon men in the mass, he saw that to assign special qualities as
special inheritances out of the reach of other complexions was wrong in
science and foolish in practice. One race could not possibly inherit
the right to rule another; one race could not possibly be dearer than
another to the Omnipotence that he believed had created all.
Equality, then, was not a dream of enthusiasts, like those of France;
equality was the scientific fact. Liberty was not a rare chrism with
which were touched the lips of a few peoples set apart by their
complexions for this distinction; liberty was the indefeasible right of
all.
Manila, Philippine Islands, year 1876—this was. He found nothing in the
text-books put into his hands then that bred any of these ideas; above
all, there was nothing of the kind in the tuition he was receiving.
When he was a student at the Ateneo and later at the University of
Santo Tomas, the trend of thought there and elsewhere ran all the other
way. By his own mental processes he had worked out, when he was hardly
more than a boy, the theory to which gray-beard science was to come a
few years later. What he felt then the best schools teach now; a fact
that if there were nothing else would establish his precocity. But we
are to remember that he had formed early a habit of independent
thinking and had been stimulated to form it. This accounts for much.
Walls of convention that shut in upon and crushed the intellectual
machinery of so many other youths (there and elsewhere) had no terrors
for him; despite all weight of eminent authority he would at all times
and on all subjects think for himself. To be thus erect intellectually
in a university, even of these days and in these nations of ours
abreast with the front line of human advance, is still not so easy that
we fail to mark it if ever we find it. In his day, in his nation, then
intellectually dragged along at the moldering chariot-wheels of antique
formality, behold a marvel and no less.
This habitual attitude of mind was a great asset in his make-up—the
complete intellectual emancipation of the querist that will take
nothing for granted, but without bias or passion will investigate,
consider, weigh, seek, and decide. Being without feeling, it was
curiously counterpoised against another asset that was all feeling,
deep and real. His mind might climb into abstraction’s chilly heights;
his heart would be hot for Filipinas. He was an example of that
enlightened patriotism that has redeemed the word from its cheap and
reactionary definitions. It was no mere instinct of attachment to the
walls wherein he was born that moved him, the instinct that causes
goats to come home and cows to low when they are sold. He saw a people
of whom he was a member bowed under monstrous injustice, denied the
birthright of opportunity, slandered by oppressors, and contemned by a
world that took these slanderous inventions for a true coinage. In a
soul that worshiped justice and loved equity, he revolted against these
abominations, as it was certain he would have revolted against the same
wrongs practised against another people.
Not in the same degree; for at home the brand had been thrust deep into
him. He might not even have come, so far in advance of his time, upon
the modern theory of races if he had not started with a sense of
resentment against the suffering of his own. But when he had satisfied
himself of the truth of his theory, he naturally applied it to his own
people and felt more than ever the yoke that galled and hobbled them.
If the Filipino was not in fact made of different stuff from the marl
that made up the white man; if he was held in subjection not because he
was inferior in capacity but because he was shouldered out of his due
share of the world’s light and hope, again how much more terrible was
his plight! An aspiring soul, as fine and sure as any other, held as a
brother to the ox, Rizal began to perceive even in those early days
that the Filipinos were like a river that some great arbitrary force
had closed in and dammed back. He could see the water rising and hear
it struggling, and knew that some time it would break through the
barriers and run its due course. To his thinking, the real powers of
his people were latent, but of a kind the world would have to admit
when these powers should be set free. And what should set them free?
Education and political liberty.
It has become a habit among some writers and speakers to look upon
Rizal as a kind of superman, a creature of abnormal gifts, a brilliant
exception to the common endowment of the Filipino. Some have described
him as a bright, strange meteor flashing against a background of
Malayan incapacity. [36] As this narrative of a wonderful life unfolds
it will probably show that the man thus pedestaled was only human and
that the secret of his great works, enduring influence and pre-eminence
in so many walks was nothing mysterious but plainly understandable. He
had a twofold inspiration. First, he developed a habit of ceaseless
industry, carefully ordered, carefully followed. Second, and even
better than this, from his youth he had been overmastered, fired and
whirled along by a vision of his people redeemed. So then to their
redemption he consecrated his life. He did it in his closet, quietly,
without theatrics and without telling anybody. Macaulay’s theory that
every great man has something of the charlatan in him falls short in
this instance. For him the grand stand never existed. Whatever he did
was dedicated first in his heart to Filipinas; whatever he thought,
planned, dreamed, or hoped for had some reference to her and her
service, and now when he studied it was to fit himself to serve her
better.
We come back to him, knocking at the gate of Ateneo, eleven years old,
small for his age, and all a boy still; for we have shot far ahead of
that day to deal with the development of the ideas of which he was
slowly possessed. It was not with a head full of philosophy that he
made his application to the famous school, but, as he tells us in his
short notes on his life, a heart full of misgivings. The day was June
10, 1872, and he was to take his entrance examinations at the College
of San Juan de Letran, Manila. Christian doctrine, arithmetic, and
reading were the branches of human erudition required of youth that
sought to enter those doors. It is to be supposed that José could have
passed them with his eyes shut. He received the required mark and spent
the next few days at home. When he returned to Manila to begin his
studies at the Ateneo, “even then,” he says, “I felt that unhappiness
was in store for me.” [37]
For all his good passing-mark, he came near to miss the opening he
sought. Father Fernando, the Jesuit priest then in charge of the
Ateneo, looked upon him without favor. He had come late in the term,
for one thing; and then he was so small and slight. Only at the
intercession of Dr. Manuel Burgos, a nephew of the priest officially
murdered on Bagumbayan Field, the rules were relaxed and the midget
from Calamba allowed to come in. For the moment he forgot his
forebodings. With joy he put on the school uniform, the white coat
called an americana, the necktie, and the rest. When he found himself
in the chapel of the Jesuit fathers to hear mass, surrounded with
strange faces, a new boy in a new school, he prayed fervently. Then he
says he went to the class-room and appraised his teachers and
school-fellows, on whom he seems to have looked with preternaturally
keen eyes.
Father José Bech was a tall man, thin and somewhat stooping, but
quick in his movements. His face was ascetic, yet animated. The
eyes were small and sunken, the nose sharp and Grecian. His thin
lips curved downward. He was a little eccentric, at times being out
of humor and intolerant and at other times amusing himself by
playing like a child.
Some of my schoolmates were interesting enough to warrant
mentioning them by name. A boy, or rather a young man from my own
province, Florencio Gavino Oliva, was of exceptional talents but
only average application. The same was true of Moisés Santiago. He
was a mathematician and penman. Also it was true of Gonzalo
Manzano. The last named then held the position of Roman Emperor.
The title seems incongruous, but Rizal explains that to stimulate the
boys in Jesuit colleges the custom was to divide them into two
“empires,” one Roman, the other Carthaginian or Greek. These were
continually at war—academic. The battles fought were in the class-room,
over recitations. Points were scored by discovering errors in the work
of the hated foe. Rizal was placed at the bottom of the cohorts of one
of these “empires,” a private in the rear ranks. Within a month he was
emperor; he had outstripped everybody else.
Paciano was there that first day and took him in charge. He would not
allow the sensitive little artist to lodge in the Walled City or
ancient part of Manila, “which seemed very gloomy to me,” says Rizal, a
judgment others might echo. In another quarter of the town, twenty-five
minutes away, he was lodged with an old maid, who seemed to have a
superfluity of other lodgers and a scarcity of room to stow them in. “I
must not speak of my sufferings,” says José, with pious resignation.
[38]
The Ateneo was not an easy school in which to gain distinction or to
win favor; Rizal speedily achieved both. By the end of the first week
he was going up in his class. In a month he had captured his first
prize and seems to have looked upon it with rapture. At the end of the
first quarter he had won another prize and the grade of “excellent.” He
confesses that for the rest of that year he did not care to apply
himself. He had taken on a boyish resentment to something a teacher had
said, he explains. Possibly he was not yet inured to the prevailing
method of driving instruction into the heads of the young with the aid
of sarcasm and shouts. At the end of the year he says as if with a kind
of sigh, “I had only second place in all my subjects.” He received the
grade of “excellent” but no prizes, and the lack seems to have goaded
him to remorse.
It must have been efficacious, for when he returned to school he flung
himself with something like passion into the race for these laurels,
and it was said of him that no student there had ever equaled his
performance. The fathers began to look with wondering pride upon this
premier medal winner. For all that, he was a boy still and no mere
Johnny Dighard; he had fights and he read novels and he even found time
for social amenities, so called. At these latter he seems not to have
won distinction, though the records are meager; but at least it may be
said for him that he managed to fall in love. [39] One of the first
works of fiction he read was Dumas’s “Count of Monte Christo” in
Spanish. He says that it gave him “delight,” but it did more than that
for him. The wrongs and sufferings of Edmond Dantes bore in upon him