The hero of the Filipinos

by Charles Edward Russell; Eulogio Balan Rodriguez

A FLOAT, RIZAL DAY, DECEMBER 30, 1922

The more his brief career is studied the more it appears as apart from the ordinary aims and walks of men—singular, selfless, and admirable. If while he lived he had little recognition worthy of his great attainments, the veneration of his countrymen since his death has atoned for all former indifference anywhere. For the term of Spain’s dominion and a short time thereafter his dust remained obscurely buried.[6] When peace had come between the Americans and Filipinos both began to pay tribute to his memory. The body was disinterred from its nameless grave and reburied with high honors, civic and military. When the Filipinos came to have a measure of control over their own affairs they made a new province of the region around Manila, including Calamba, and named it Rizal. The anniversary of his death they made the national holy day. On the spot where he was killed [[329]]they erected a magnificent monument, a stately and worthy memorial. Elsewhere they multiplied the tributes to his fame until by 1921 scarcely a considerable town in the Philippines was without his statue or bust or some commemoration of his story. Of the ground he had tilled in Dapitan, surrounding the little house where he had taught his school, a national park was made. In his honor the waterworks he had engineered were extended and perpetuated. From every available source the Government collected, often at great cost, the relics of his physical existence.[7]

Each return of Rizal day is marked with elaborate ceremonies; addresses are delivered to his memory; the schools hold special exercises; the press reviews his life and dwells upon its import. Year by year the [[330]]earnestness of these tributes increases. Other men, as their tangible presence recedes, become more or less the lay figures of history. This man seems to become with time only the more potent and real.

Happy should be the land that has such a national hero, in whom the pitiless searchings of later years have not discovered enough of flaw to discredit any part of the homage paid him but instead cause him to appear always the more imposing figure, morally as well as intellectually. It is but truth to say that his analogue is hard to find in any nation of any color at any period of history. He had, what is so seldom to be found in the men we call great, a union of brilliant gifts and of lofty character. Of him it is never necessary to offer the Baconian apology; he was of the brightest and wisest of mankind but without an alloying trace of the mean.

Intellectually, there is no doubt he deserved the praise paid wonderingly to him by Sir Hugh Clifford and others; he was a master figure. To the capacity of his mind there seemed no normal limit; he could comprehend any subject, learn any craft, acquire any language, absorb any science. It seemed to be a mind of the order of Octopi, with tentacles that reached out and pumped up not the superficies but the heart of the matter. Hence he could out-argue the learned theologians with the most abstruse lore of their cult, discuss with the artists the recondite principles of their art, classify for entomologists and zoölogists unheard-of specimens of life, thread with economists the endless mazes of theoretical taxation, write exquisite lyrics and sing them to music of his own composing. [[331]]Such are the facts of his life, however reluctant prejudice may be to acknowledge them. If there has yet appeared upon this earth what may be justly called a universal genius, it seems from the records that he was not of the white race, the world’s confident overlords, but of the misunderstood Malay.

So slowly we yield to truth when it runs counter to theories that it may be advisable to dwell for another moment on this man’s indisputable achievements. Let us say, then, that to have attained to his mastery of any two of the branches of knowledge he followed would have deserved distinction; yet he attained to this mastery in six or seven. He was one of the greatest ophthalmologists of his time; he was a great ethnologist, anthropologist, biologist, zoölogist, linguist; he was sculptor, painter, illustrator, poet, novelist, publicist, engineer, educator, reformer. With almost any of these gifts or accomplishments or whatever they may be termed, he could have won to eminence or to wealth anywhere among civilized men. He is almost the only example we have of a man marvelously endowed for material success and putting it all aside and every thought of it; putting aside, too, even the natural yearning for renown, that he might give himself entirely to the one end of benefiting his people.

Of the veritable basis for these conclusions, so strange in an age and a world that makes of disillusion a fetish, no fair-minded inquirer can have a doubt. It is but the truth that Rizal’s private life has endured the touch as surely as his public career.[8] That government [[332]]of himself he began to learn at the Ateneo, that scorn of the revolt of flesh and fierce determination to put it under the dominion of spirit, he diligently fostered all his life. He had controversies and disputes; he even had quarrels (as we have seen) that might have had deadly outcome; it appears that he did not in any of these lose the perfect control of his temper. The contagion of the world’s slow stain never came near him. He looked upon life and all its phases with a coolly reasoned disdain of all things false. A hundred times he might have saved himself with one only step that the world would have applauded; he would not take that step because it would mean a compromise with the stern, iron-bound Puritan-like standard of virtue he had chosen for himself. No instance has been discovered in him of lies or equivocation. As he himself declared, he had his full share of human frailties and failings, but he managed to avoid those that scar the soul. Some of his jests, it is true, verged upon practical joking, the usual contradiction in men of a melancholy inclining. The wisdom of his marriage, for reasons that need not be gone into here, is now rather more than questionable. On the subject of the capacity of the Filipinos for immediate self-government in his own time, it seems to us clear [[333]]he was gravely in error. Of the necessity of higher education as a foundation for independence he made far too much. When he held that reforms must needs come from above and could not be expected to be moved from below he must have overlooked some sure lessons of history. That naïve notion of his earlier years, that Spain would for the asking supplant exploitation with altruism was, even in his youth, hardly what men would expect from a mind so original and powerful, so sure and clear. And yet in all his relations to and great services for his country, in his incalculable contributions to the cause of eventual liberty, in his complex relations to science, art, literature, serious and valuable undertakings for the elevation of his fellows, in great trials alike and among the midges of everyday existence, the world may see in him the figure of a man: upright, alert, capable, resolute, patient, resourceful, and without guile.

As to few men it has been given to bring to the struggles of life so great a natural armament, few also have been able to wield in so short a time a power so momentous. To all the Far East he is slowly becoming a figure of inspiration and hope. To the modern Filipino world he gave an impetus and an impress it can hardly lose in generations if ever. To the movement for Philippine independence he gave vitality, character, and energy that have grown stronger year after year. Even when we consider the natural passion of the race for freedom and the long succession of revolts with which it shook Spanish rule, this remains substantially true. With his teachings first, then his sarcasms and censures, then his appeals, he [[334]]showed the way to unity and drove the people along it. At his death he bequeathed to them his unquenchable yearning for liberty, while he gave them the necessary background of sacrifice for it. Whatever has been gained for nationality has been gained under this inspiration; without or beyond his knowledge, Rizal was the father of Philippine independence and the lofty model toward which Philippine life may aspire.

Those that seek to disparage the race (so called) to which he belonged find some refuge in the assertion that he was a strange and inexplicable exception to the general incompetence, a star against a background of ineptitude. Against this all just men will protest. Elsewhere the great minds of every nation have exalted that nation in the world’s esteem. The single lives that make up so much of the historic glory surrounding Greece, Rome, Italy, Holland, and our own Revolutionary period we do not sharply contrast against a darkness of general inferiority around these men, but think of them as lighting up all the land that bore them. Even if it were true that Rizal was the only great man of the Filipino people, Filipinos might well claim the same basis of judgment. But the more the leaders of the Philippine revolution are studied—Mabini, Luna, the two del Pilars, Calderon—the more men will be convinced that Rizal was the highest expression of an intellectual force, stimulated by the growing passion for liberty but still a power inherent in the race.

A race that gave such men to the world, that has at the same time proved so incontestably its capacity equally for self-expansion and for self-mastery, may [[335]]well expect to be heard when asserting the foundation principles of faith and common honesty, it faces the United States and in the circle of nations demands the place it has earned. [[337]]