[16] See Dr. Blumentritt’s article, [Appendix D]. [↑]
[17] Dr. Blumentritt; see [Appendix D]. [↑]
[18] “Blackwood’s,” November, 1902, p. 620. [↑]
[19] “Boyhood Story,” p. vi. [↑]
[20] “Boyhood Story,” p. 19. [↑]
[21] With a girl older than he was and already engaged to another. She seems to have been something of a flirt. A few years afterward he wrote (apparently for himself) an account of his feelings and sufferings in those days. Mariano Ponce, his friend and confidant, published the document in the “Revista Filipina,” December, 1916. It shows Rizal to have been a poetical and dreamy lover. When he discovered the hopeless nature of his attachment he wandered alone in the woods, given up to a melancholy conviction of misfortune, but recovered in time to fall in love again and learn the reality of his forebodings. [↑]
CHAPTER III
FIRST CONTACTS WITH THE ENEMY
For the times and the place the Ateneo was a good school, by general consent the best in the Islands, in some respects matching well with an inferior preparatory school in America. When the Jesuits were allowed to return to the country from which they had been banished, they brought with them new ideas of education into a region where for two hundred years such imports had been rare. For all that, education at the Ateneo was not to be had except at the price of a struggle. There was no suggestion there, at least, of Tennyson’s idea of a row of empty pates and kindly Instruction tumbling in the sciences. A student like Rizal, reputed in his second year to be the hardest working in the institution, seemed like a soldier fighting in doubtful trenches; education to be won, as it were, by hand-to-hand conflict. Years afterward Rizal wrote in his own vivid style a description of the manner in which wisdom was imparted in even the highest Philippine seat of learning, from which wonder grows to amazement that there were in those days any educated Filipinos. It reveals them again as of iron will and unmatchable persistence. No such dogged resolution in chase of knowledge is now required of any people; the pursuit of learning under difficulties, it may well be called. A Filipino reading it now may be excused if he is moved somewhat to hold [[52]]up his head among the nations. Every fact that one of his countrymen added to his store he must wrest from the hard hands of prejudice and desperate chance.