An Analysis of Filipino Character
American Pupils and Filipino Pupils Contrasted—The Filipinos’ Belief That They Are Highly Developed Musicians—Their Morbid Sensitiveness to Criticism—Explanation of Their Desire for Education—Their Belief That They Could Achieve Great Success in Manufactures, Arts, and Literature If Left to Govern Themselves—Their Lack of Creative Ability—Dillettanteism of Leading Filipinos—Manual Jealousies of the People—Lack of Real Democratic Spirit in America—The Pride of Filipino Men Compared to That of American Women.
So long as they find firmness and justice in the teacher, Filipino children are far easier to discipline than are American children. At the first sign of weakness in the teacher or in the Government which is behind him, they are infinitely more unruly and arrogant than are the children of our own race. There is, in even the most truculent American child, a sense of the eternal fitness of things which the Filipino lacks. American children are restless and mischievous. They are on the alert for any sign of overstepping the limits of lawful authority on the part of the teacher, and they have no compunctions about forcing him to recognize that he rules by the consent of the governed, and that he must not mistake their complaisance for servility. On the other hand, they have, with rare exceptions, a respect for the value of a teacher’s opinion in the subjects which he teaches, and will seldom contradict or oppose him in matters that pertain wholly to learning. A class of American children which would support in every possible way one of their number in defying authority would not hesitate to make that same companion’s life a burden to him if he should set up his own opinion on abstract matters in contradiction to his teacher’s. Except when a teacher signally proves his incapacity, American children are willing to grant the broad premise that he knows more than they do, and that, if he does not, he at least ought to know more. Filipino children reverse this attitude. They are quite docile, seldom think of disputing authority as applied to discipline, but they will naively cling to a position and dispute both fact and philosophy in the face of quoted authority, or explanation, or even of sarcasm. The following anecdote illustrates this peculiarity. It happened in my own school and is at first hand.
One of the American teachers was training a Filipino boy to make a recitation. The boy had adopted a plan of lifting one hand in an impassioned gesture, holding it a moment, and of letting it drop, only to repeat the movement with the other hand. After he had prolonged this action, in spite of frequent criticism, till he looked like a fragment of the ballet of “La Poupée,” the teacher lost patience.
“Domingo,” she said, “I have told you again and again not to make those pointless, mechanical gestures. Why do you do it? They are inappropriate and artificial, and they make you look like a fool.”
Domingo paused and contemplated her with the pity which Filipinos often display for our artistic inappreciativeness.
“Madame,” he replied in a pained voice, “you surprise me. Those gestures are not foolishness. They are talent. I thought they would please you.”
In my own early days I was once criticised by one of the young ladies of Capiz for my pronunciation of the letter c in the Spanish word ciudad. I replied that my giving the sound of th to the letter was correct Spanish, whereupon she advised me to pay no attention to the Spanish pronunciation, as the Filipinos speak better Spanish than do the Spanish themselves. What she meant was that the avoidance of th sounds in c and z, which the Filipinos invariably pronounce like s, is an improvement to the Spanish language. I imagined some of that young lady’s kindred ten years later arguing to prove that the Filipino corruption of th in English words—pronouncing “thirty” as “sirty,” and “thick” as “sick”—arguing that such English is superior to English as we speak it. Here are some typically mispronounced English sentences: “If Maria has seben fencils and see loses sree, see will hab four fencils left, and if her moser gibs her eight fencils, see will hab twel’ fencils in all.” Here is another: “Pedro has a new fair of voots.” Another: “If one fint ob binegar costs fi’ cents, sree fints will cost sree times fi’ cents, or fikteen cents.” It would, I think, be hard to convince us that the euphonic changes in these words are an improvement to our language.
Some four years ago, I was teaching a class in the Manila School of Arts and Trades, and was giving some directions about the word form of English sentences. I advised the class to stick to simple direct sentences, since they would never have any use for a literary style in English. Some six or eight young men instantly dissented from this proposition, and insisted that they were capable of acquiring the best literary style. Not one of them could have written a page of clear, grammatical, idiomatic English. I tried to make it clear to them that literary English and colloquial English are two different things, and that what they needed was plain, precise English as a medium of exchange in business, and I said, incidentally, that such was the English possessed by the major portion of the English-speaking race. I said that although the American nation numbered eighty millions, most of whom were educated and able to make an intelligent use of their language in conversation or in writing, the percentage of great writers and speakers always had been small and always would be so.
When I had finished, the son of a local editor, arose and replied as follows: “Yes, madame, what you say of Americans is true. But we are different. We are a literary people. We are only eight millions, but we have hundreds and thousands of orators. We have the literary sense for all languages.”
Nearly thirty years ago, when I was a pupil in the Kansas City, Missouri, High School, the stepson of a United States Circuit judge made a brutally rude and insubordinate reply to a woman teacher who said to him, in reference to an excuse which he had given for tardiness, “That is not a good excuse.” The young man turned an insolent eye upon the teacher—a gray-haired woman—and replied, “It’s good enough for me. What are you going to do about it?”
The Home of an American Schoolteacher
I cannot conceive that a Filipino child would be guilty of such insolence, such defiance of decency and order. But never have I met an American child who would have the artless indiscretion to put himself in the position of Domingo. The American child does not mind violating a rule. He is chary of criticising its propriety or its value. In other words, the American child does not mind doing wrong, but he is wary of making a fool of himself; and I have yet to meet the Filipino child who entertained the faintest suspicion that it was possible for him to make a fool of himself. Nor is the attitude of dissent among Filipinos limited to those who express themselves. It is sometimes very trying to feel that after long-winded eloquence, after citation and demonstration, you have made no more real impression upon the silent than upon the talkative, and that, indeed, the gentle reserve of some of your auditors is based upon the conviction that your own position is the result of indomitable ignorance. One of my friends has met this spirit in a class in the Manila High School. A certain boy insists that he has seen the iron head of a thunderbolt, and although he makes “passing grades” in physics, he does not believe in physics. He regards our explanations of the phenomena of lightning as a parcel of foolishness in no wise to stand the test of his own experience, and nothing can silence him. “But, ma’am,” he says, when electricity is under discussion, “I am see the head of a thunder under our house.” This young gentleman will graduate in a year or two, and the tourist from the States will look over the course of study of the Manila High School and go home telling his brethren that the Filipino children are able to compete successfully with American youth in the studies of a secondary education. I myself had a heart-breaking time with a sixth-grade class in one of the intermediate schools of Manila. The children had been studying animal life and plant life, and could talk most learnedly about anthropoid apes, and “habitats” and other things; but they undertook to convince me that Filipino divers can stay under water an hour without any diving apparatus, and that the reason for this power is that the diver is “brother to a snake”—that is, that when the mother gave birth to the child, she gave birth to a snake also, and that some mysterious power remains in persons so born.
Filipino children are not restless and have no tradition of enmity between teacher and pupil to urge them into petty wrong-doing. Their attitude toward the teacher is a very kindly one, and they are almost uniformly courteous. Their powers of concentration are not equal to those of American children, and they cannot be forced into a temporarily heavy grind, but neither do they suffer from the extremes of indolence and application which are the penalty of the nervous energy of our own race. They are attentive (which the American child is not) but not retentive, and they can keep up a steady, even pull at regular tasks, especially in routine work, at which American children usually rebel. In fact, they prefer routine work to variety, and grow discouraged quickly when they have to puzzle out things for themselves. They will faithfully memorize pages and pages of matter which they do not understand, a task at which our nervous American children would completely fail. They are exceedingly sensitive to criticism, and respond quickly to praise. Unfortunately the narrow experience of the race, and the isolation and the general ignorance of the country, make praise a dangerous weapon in the hands of a teacher; for a child is apt to educe a positive and not a relative meaning from the compliment. Filipino children have not attained the mental state of being able to qualify in innumerable degrees. If a teacher hands back a composition to an American boy with the words “Well done,” the child understands perfectly that his instructor means well as compared with the work of his classmates. The Filipino is inclined to think that she means positively well done—above the average for all the world. I once complimented a class in Capiz on the ease with which they sang four-part music, and said, what I truly feel, that the Filipinos are a people of unusual musical ability. They managed to extract from the compliment the idea that the musical development of the Filipinos is far in advance of that of the Americans.
Middle-class Filipinos have a very inadequate conception of the tremendous wealth of artistic, literary, and musical talent interwoven with the world’s development, and are especially inclined to pride themselves upon their racial excellence in these lines, where, in truth, they have achieved almost no development whatever in spite of the possession of undoubted talent. They do not understand the value of long training, and are inclined to assume that the mere possession of a creative instinct is final evidence of excellence in any art.
It will be some time before what real talent they have will make itself felt in any line, because it will take a great deal of tactful handling to make them reveal their natural artistic trend instead of falling into imitation of Europe and America. It is strange that a people so tenacious of its opinions with regard to matters of fact should be so willing to surrender its ideal with regard to the thing of which a nation has most reason to be tenacious, its natural expression. But the whole race is so morbidly sensitive to the sneer that everything Filipino is necessarily crude that the young art student or the young musical student feels that his only hope of winning commendation is in painting or playing or composing after European models; while as for the populace at large it has its own standards in which other motives than artistic excellence play the largest part.
I had a friend, a young Filipino girl, who has been one of the most diligent among the pupils of the American schools. She was staying with me two or three years ago when my publisher sent me a copy of a primer intended for use in the Philippines, and which had just been gotten out in the United States. The publisher had spared no expense in his illustrations, and we were tremendously proud of the artistic side of the book. This Filipino girl had heard me use the expression “poor white trash,” and I had explained to her how the Southern negroes use the words as a term of derision of those who fail to live up to the traditions of race and family. When I took my book to her in the joy of an author in her first complete production, she looked at it a minute and burst into tears. “Poor Filipino trash!” was all she could say for a long time, and I finally pieced it out that she was enraged because the Filipino boys and girls in my book were sometimes barefooted, sometimes clad in chinelas, and wore native camisas instead of American suits and dresses. I pointed out to her that not one Filipino child in a hundred dresses otherwise, but my argument was of no avail. The children in the American readers wore natty jackets and hats and high-heeled shoes, and winter wraps, even at play, and she wanted the Filipino children to look the same.
A great deal has been said in the American press about the eagerness for education here. The desire for education, however, does not come from any real dissatisfaction which the Filipinos have with themselves, but from eagerness to confute the reproach which has been heaped upon them of being unprogressive and uneducated. It is an abnormal condition, the result of association of a people naturally proud and sensitive with a people proud and arrogant. At present the desire for progress in things educational and even in things material is more or less ineffective because it is fed from race sensitiveness rather than from genuine discontent with the existing order of things. The educated classes of Filipinos are not at all dissatisfied with the kind and quality of education which they possess; agriculturists are not dissatisfied with their agricultural implements; the artisans are not, as a class, dissatisfied with their tools or ashamed of their labor. If you talk to a Filipino carpenter about the carefully constructed houses of America, he does not sigh. He merely says, “That is very good for America, but here different custom,” Filipino cooks are not dissatisfied with the terrible fugons which fill their eyes with smoke and blacken the cooking utensils, and have to be fanned and puffed at every few minutes and occasionally set the house on fire. The natural causes of growth are not widely existent, and it is still problematic if they will ever come into being. Meanwhile growth goes on stimulated by the eternal criticism, the sting of which the Filipinos would move heaven and earth to escape.
Our own national progress and that of the European nations from whom we are descended have been so differently conceived and developed that we can hardly realize the peculiar process through which Filipinos are passing. We cannot conceive of Robert Fulton tearing his hair and undertaking a course in mechanics with the ulterior view of inventing something to prove that the American race is an inventive one. We cannot imagine Eli Whitney buried in thought, wondering how he could make a cotton gin to disprove the statement that the Americans are an unprogressive people. Cyrus Hall McCormick did not go out and manufacture a reaper because he was infuriated by a German newspaper taunt that the Americans were backward in agriculture. Nor can we fancy that John Hay while dealing with the Chinese crisis in 1900 was continually distracting his mind from the tremendously grave points at issue by wondering if he could not do something a little cleverer than the other diplomats would do.
All the natural laws of development are turned around in the Philippines, and motives which should belong to the crowning years of a nation’s life seem to have become mixed in at the beginning—a condition, due, of course, to the fact that the Filipinos began the march of progress at a time when the telegraph and the cable and books and newspapers and globe-trotters submitted their early development to a harrowing comparison and observation. The Filipino is like an orphan baby, not allowed to have his cramps and colic and to cut his teeth in the decent retirement of the parental nursery, but dragged out instead into distressing publicity, told that his wails are louder, his digestive habits more uncertain, his milk teeth more unsatisfactory, than the wails or the digestive habits or the milk teeth of any other baby that ever went through the developing process. Naturally he is self-conscious, and—let us be truthful—not having been a very promising baby from the beginning, both he and his nurses have had a hard time.
However, turned around or not, we are not responsible for the condition. The Filipinos had arrived at the self-conscious stage before we came here, and we have had to accept the situation and make the best of it.
The American press of Manila, with the very best of intentions, has indulged itself in much editorial comment, and the more the condition of things is discussed, the more the native press strengthens in its quick sensitiveness. The present attitude of the upper, or governing, class of Filipinos is this: “We want the best of everything in the world—of education, of morals, of business methods, of social polish, of literature, art, and music, of roads and bridges, of agricultural machinery, and of local transportation, and we can attain these things.” They have laid down in the beginning a premise for which no inductive process can be found as justification,—that the Filipino people is capable of doing anything which any other nation has done; and that, given time and opportunity—especially the opportunity of managing their own process of development—they will demonstrate their capacity. The flat contradiction of this position which is not infrequently taken by Americans in discussing Filipinos is, of course, as extreme as the Filipino position itself, and, as an observer, I have little to do with either. But at the present time I do feel warranted in stating that the mass of intelligent Filipinos fail to distinguish between critical or appreciative ability and real creative ability, and that what they are acquiring in huge doses just now is the critical and not the creative. Moreover, of the great body of persons who make the demand for the best, only a very few have any idea of what is the best except in book learning and social polish. The prominent men among the Filipinos to-day are those who were educated in Europe or in Filipino schools modelled on European patterns. Their idea of education is a social one—an education which fits a man to be considered a gentleman and to be an adornment to the society of his peers. They have no conception of the American specialization idea in education which grants a doctor’s degree to a man who says “would have went” and “He come to my house yesterday.” The Filipino leaders have a perfectly clear idea of what they want educationally, of what they consider the best, and they are jealously watching the educational department to see that they get it. The American press urges more and more manual training, and the Filipino press, because manual training is in the list of things marked “best,” echoes the general call. But there is no small body of hobbyists in the Islands keeping a jealous eye on the manual-training department of education. It could be dropped out of the curriculum by simply allowing it to become less and less effectual, and so long as no formal announcement was made the Filipinos would not find out what was being done. But in Manila and in most provincial towns there are enough Filipinos who know what musical instruction is to watch that the musical training be not too badly administered.
There is plenty of complaint about the Sanitary System of Manila, there are plenty of people to complain about what is being done, but there is no small organized body of Filipinos whose paramount interest in life is fixed upon sanitation and health, and who make it their thankless task to harry the department and to preach ceaselessly at the unthinking public till they get what they want. The legislators of the Philippines are gentlemen born, men educated in conformity to the ideals of education in aristocratic countries, but unfortunately they have not had, owing to the political conditions which have prevailed here, the practical experience of an aristocratic body in other lands. In Mrs. Ward’s “William Ashe” there is an analysis of a gouty and rather stupid old statesman, who is so exactly a summary of what a Filipino statesman is not that I cannot forbear quoting it here:
“He possessed that narrow, but still most serviceable fund of human experience which the English land-owner, while our English tradition subsists, can hardly escape if he will. As guardsman, volunteer, magistrate, lord lieutenant, member (for the sake of his name and his acres) of various important commissions, as military attaché even for a short time to an important embassy, he had acquired, by mere living, that for which his intellectual betters had often envied him—a certain shrewdness, a certain instinct both for men and affairs which were often of more service to him than finer brains to other persons.”
The only large practical experience which Filipino leaders have enjoyed has come through their being land-owners and agriculturists. But agriculture has not been competitive; and when the land-owning class travelled, it was chiefly in Spain, which can hardly be called a progressive agricultural country. Of men of the artisan class who have worked their way up by their own efforts from ignorance to education, from poverty to riches; of men who have had any large available experience in manual labor or in specialised industries, the present Assembly feels the lack. The Filipino leaders are a body of polished gentlemen, more versed in law than in anything else, with varying side lines of dilettante tastes in numerous directions.
A Characteristic Group of Filipino Students
Such as they are, the schoolboy desires to be. One of the periodic frenzies of the local American press is an appeal to teachers—why are they not remodelling character, why do not the aims and ideals which it is their business to instil make a greater showing after ten years of American occupation? American teachers have talked themselves hoarse, and as far as talking can go, they have influenced ideals. The child’s conscious ideal about which he talks in public, and to which he devotes about one one-thousandth of his thinking time, is some such person as George Washington, or Abraham Lincoln, or James A. Garfield, who drove the canal boat and rose to be President of the United States. But the subconscious ideal which is always in his mind, upon which he patterns unthinkingly his speech and his manners and his dreams of success, is—and it would be unnatural if it were otherwise—some local potentate who will not carry home his own little bag of Conant currency when he receives his salary at the end of the month. What are a name and a few moral platitudes about a dead-and-gone hero? What can they mean to a shirtless urchin with a hungry stomach, against the patent object-lesson of his own countryman whom not only his fellow citizens, but the invader, must treat with consideration? It would be far easier to distract the attention of the children of the State of Ohio from their distinguished fellow-citizens, William H. Taft and John D. Rockefeller, to fix it upon the late Lord Cromer or that Earl of Halifax known as the “Trimmer,” than it is to tell a Filipino child that the way to distinction lies through toil and sweat. Children are very patient about listening to talk, but they are going to pattern themselves upon what is obvious. Twenty or thirty years from now, when the American school system will have aided certain sons of the people, men of elemental strength, to bully and fight their way to the front, and they will have become the evidence that we were telling the truth—then will the results be visible in more things than in annual school commencements and in an increase in the output of stenographers and bookkeepers.
The weakest point in a Filipino child’s character is his quick jealousy and his pride. His jealousy is of the sort constitutionally inimical to solidarity. Paradoxical as the statement may seem, the Filipinos are more aristocratic in their theories of life than we are, and more democratic in their individual constitution. Our democracy has always been tempered by common sense and practicality. We like to say at church that all men are brothers, and on the Fourth of July to declare that they are born free and equal; but we do not undertake to put these theories into practice. Every individual citizen of the United States is not walking about with a harrowing dread of doing something that admits a lesser self-esteem than his neighbor may possess. If a fire breaks out in his neighborhood, and a little action on his part can stop it before it gets a dangerous start, he does not hesitate to act for fear doing so will show him possessed of less personal pride than his neighbor up the street. If he is earning sixty dollars a month, and learns that some other employee in another house is getting more money for the same work, he does not take the chances of starvation because to submit to the condition is to admit that he is less important than another man. Yet the whole laboring element of the Filipino people is permeated by just such a spirit. It is practically impossible to fix a price for labor or for produce by any of the laws of supply and demand that regulate such things elsewhere. The personal jealousies, the personal assertions of individuals continually interfere with the normal conditions of trade. If in the market some American comes along in a hurry and pays a peso for a fish, the normal price of which is about thirty-five cents, the price of fish goes up all through the market—for Americans. You may offer eighty cents and be refused, and the owner will sell two minutes after to a Filipino for thirty-five. But in so doing he does not “lose his face.” The other man got a peso from an American, and a man who takes less—from an American—is owning himself less able than his companions.
We talk of democracy, but we never know how little democratic we are till we come in contact with the real article. Can you conceive what would be the commercial chaos of America to-morrow if the humblest laborer had the quick personal pride of the millionaire? With all our alleged democracy, we realize the impossibility of ringing Mrs. Vanderbilt’s doorbell and asking her to sell us a few flowers from her conservatory or to direct us to a good dressmaker, though we can take just such liberties with houses where the evidences that money would be welcome are patent.
The American laborer does not mind going to and from his work in laboring clothes, and he makes no attempt to seem anything but a laboring man. But you cannot tell in a Manila street car whether the white-clad man at your side is a government clerk at sixty pesos a month or a day laborer at fifteen. I once lost a servant because I commanded him to carry some clothes to my laundress. “Go on the street with a bundle of clothes, and get into the street car with them! I would rather die!” he said; and he quitted rather than do it.
Compare that with the average common-sense attitude of the American laboring man or even the professional man. Until he becomes really a great man and lives in the white light of publicity, the American citizen does not concern himself with his conduct at all as it relates to his personal importance. He is likely to argue that he cannot do certain things which violate his ideal of manhood, or other things which are inconsistent in a member of the church, or other things which are unworthy of a democrat, or of a member of the school board, or even of an “all-round sport.” Whatever the prohibitive walls which hedge the freedom of his conduct, each is a perfectly defined one, a standard of conduct definitely outlined in his mind, to which he has pledged his allegiance; but he has no large conception that most useful things are forbidden pleasures to him because of a sense of personal importance. He has no God of the “I,” no feeling that makes him stay his hand at helping a cochero to free a fallen and injured horse, while he looks to see that some other man of his class is helping also.
There is a perfectly defined class system in the Philippines, and, between class and class, feeling is not bitter; but within each class jealousy is rampant. The Filipino, though greatly influenced by personality, does not yet conceive of a leadership based upon personality to which loyalty must be unswervingly paid. He feels the charm of personality, he yields to it just so long as it falls in with his own ideas, but the moment it crosses his own assertiveness he is ready to revolt. Many Americans speak of this characteristic as if it were a twist in character. My own opinion is that it is a passing phase, due to the Filipino’s lack of the “narrow, but most serviceable fund of human experience.” But no matter to what cause the condition is due, it makes a great difference in the life of the individual and of the social body as a whole that each unit has fixed his ideal of conduct upon an illimitable consciousness of personal importance, instead of upon perfectly defined ideals in particular matters. It makes for femininity in the race.
If the reader will meditate a little upon the difference between masculine pride and feminine pride in America, he will probably agree with me that masculine pride centres largely in loyalty to well-defined ideals of what is manly, or honorable, or bold, or just, or religious—in short, it tries to live up to the requirements of a hundred separate standards. On the other hand, feminine pride, outside of its adherence to what is chaste and womanly, consists of pride in self, a kind of self-estimate, based frequently upon social position, sometimes on a consciousness of self-importance which comes through the admiration of men. In either case the pride is likely to show itself in a jealous exaction of consideration for the individual. Such is Filipino pride. It is almost wholly concerned in guarding its vested rights, in demanding and exacting the consideration due the importance of its possessor.
Filipinos are hard to enlist in any new undertaking until they are certain that success will bring “consideration.” They love newspaper notices and publicity, they love the centre of the stage, and every new advance in intelligence is bulwarked by a disproportional demand for “consideration.”
Filipino men are not lacking in manly qualities. They have the stronger courage, the relatively stronger will and passions which distinguish the men of our own race. But they are harder to get along with than are Filipino women, because their sense of sex importance is so much exaggerated, and because, as Mr. Kipling would put it, they “have too much ego in their cosmos.” The secret consciousness of power is not enough for them. They must flash it every minute in your eyes, that you may not forget to yield the adulation due to power. Like women, they get heady on a small allowance of power; and indeed in both sexes there are emphasized certain characteristics which we are accustomed to look upon as feminine. Their pride is feminine as I have analyzed it. They rely upon intuition to guide them more than upon analysis. In enlisting coöperation, even in public matters, they are likely to appeal to a sentiment of friendship for themselves instead of demonstrating the abstract superiority of their cause. They will make a haughty public demand, but will not scruple to support it with secret petition and appeal. They are adepts at playing upon the weakness and petty vanity of others; and they deal gently with the strong, but boldly with the weak. Both men and women possess an abundance of sexual jealousy, and have, in addition, the quick sensitiveness about rank, worldly possessions, and precedence which with us has become the reproach of the feminine. Lastly, they have, in its highest development, the capacity to make a volte-face with grace and equanimity. They are cunning, but not shrewd; their reasoning is wholly deductive, they are inclined to an enthusiastic assent to large statements, especially when these take the form of moral or political truisms; but they do not submit their convictions to practical working tests. They seem often inconsistent, but observation will show that, however inconsistent their practice is with their professions, it is always consistent with their pride, as I have analyzed it in these pages.