That same year came the celebration of the first one hundred years of American independence, and the reports of it fell pat with his new meditations. As a rule, the newspapers of Manila, inspired by the Spanish habitude, had referred with phrases of contempt to the American republic. The centennial festival seemed to modify or to beat through their prejudices, for space was given to long and respectful reviews of the progress and achievements of the United States, and with these an outline of the desperate struggle by which it had won its independence. Upon a mind like Rizal’s, enlisted for freedom, susceptible to all things heroic and idealistic, the effect must have been galvanic. It [[67]]was a lesson of more than one angle. Here was a people that had been under such an incubus of political medievalism as was strangling his countrymen. A handful challenging the greatest power in the world, they had achieved their emancipation, and he could not fail to note that the disparity between the Philippines and Spain was hardly greater than that between America and Great Britain in 1776.
In the next place, the heart of the system the Americans had thrown over was the idea that the royal authority imposed upon them was of God and resistance to it was an impiety God would surely punish. One nation, according to this record, had not only resisted such authority but cast it off and trampled upon it, and, behold, its reward was not the curse but the apparent blessing of God in richest measure. He studied the history of this nation, considered its work in the world, and deemed the conclusions of Jagor to be sound and just.
But Jagor had supplied also a certain warning. “It seems to be desirable for the natives [Filipinos] that the above-mentioned views should not speedily become accomplished facts, because their education and training hitherto have not been of a nature to prepare them successfully to compete with either of the other two energetic, creative, and progressive nations.” Nothing could be plainer; this was the great work to which he should apply himself. His people must be trained and educated for the freedom they were one day to have. They must be educated first and then aroused. Therefore, whatever learning, discipline, equipment [[68]]of facts and knowledge, power and resources he could gain were capital, energy, equipment laid by for their service.
Toward two sorts of men the world has never warmed while they lived; toward a man of melancholy and a man with a fixed and serious purpose other than material. Rizal was both of these in one. A school is a microcosm of the world outside it. He was admired at the Ateneo but went his way there essentially alone. He seems to have felt that this must be so and accepted loneliness in the spirit of his philosophy and as part of the task laid upon him. The natural complement of his loneliness was an unusual capacity for friendship; the natural complement of his melancholy was a keen sense of humor and a flashing wit; for so do men seem to be made up and (except in novels and plays) never of one piece.
Being real and breathing and not a lay figure of romance, Rizal was like the rest of us, subject to gusts of this and that and a gamut of moods; and yet, like other men of strong will, managed to steer fairly straight for one landfall. When the fit was on him he was wont to draw for his family vastly funny sketches, to write quips, to make jokes, and even to fashion comic verses. His gift of portraiture, a singular power to reproduce with convincing strokes any face he had ever noted, ran over at the least provocation into rollicking burlesque. In later times he would have been a priceless cartoonist; to illuminate any thought that crossed his mind a humorous or grotesque or inspiring picture fell easily from his pencil. It was from his brooding introspection that he reacted [[69]]to his excruciatingly funny caricatures, and if he had not some such vent might have gone mad or (terrible thought!) even have become a prig.
But from these adventures he came back to the sobering facts of his mission as the business and only reality of life. To contribute something to the helping and enlightening of these people was his métier and the only thing really important. A many-sided man, as you shall see. With all the laborious exactions of his time schedule, he could still continue his worship of art and beauty; he kept on with his modeling, kept on with his painting and poetry. His holidays he sometimes spent with his mother at Calamba; and his habit was to go home to her with a pocketful of verses of his recent making. That excellent woman and judicious critic set herself to clarify and direct the fire thus burning.[9] She must have succeeded after good models, for Rizal freshened the laurels of his Ateneo triumphs by winning prizes beyond its intellectual tiltyards. The Manila Lyceum of Art and Literature founded a competition among Filipino poets, “naturales y mestizos.”[10] Rizal won it with a poem entitled “To the Philippine Youth.”[11] From a point of view that was never urged he had no right to win it: the Lyceum was supposed to be for adults, and he was only eighteen years old. But the subject had called forth the best that was in him; it offered a chance to preach his favorite theme, to appeal to his young countrymen, and to stir in them something of the passion [[70]]that moved him, while he suggested the Filipinas that might be.[12]
His achievement went beyond prize-winning. By a route that even he had never imagined, it became a thing of history. In this poem he called the Philippine Islands his “fatherland.” The Philippine youth were the Bella esperanza de la Patria Mia![13] Simple and natural as the reference was, it started the easy typhoon to blowing. No such phrase from such a source with such an application was tolerable. In his poem on “Education,” Rizal had spoken of that sweet wisdom as illuminating the “fatherland,” but this was naïvely taken to have a wholly different meaning. To these people, in the litany of lip-service, at least, the only fatherland they knew was the Spain they had never seen but of which the image in their hearts was all somber and cruel. With passionate adoration Rizal now spoke of another fatherland, of the Filipinas of his birthplace; he dared to address it even as a Spaniard might address Spain, “Vuela, Genio Grandioso!” “Come, thou great genius!” Yet he knew it as a country that breathed the effluvium of an unnatural existence—chained to a corpse. In irony he was dealing; a terrible, sobering irony. Already he felt in his heart that the existing state could not last; no proud, capable, normally minded people with a historic background of their own would long endure it. Echoes of the great wave that rolled around the rest of the world grew every day in the ears of these Islanders. Discontent surged in their hearts, and Rizal in his [[71]]poem was the first voice and wise articulation of their protest.[14]
In this, and as a piece of art, it was powerful and significant. He addressed the young men of the Philippines as if they were like other young men of the world, free, and able to put forth their powers, to make their way; not inferior, not the fags and drudges of the hateful Spanish tradition. Here was innovation—here was danger! In no such vein were they accustomed to be addressed, and the neuremic espionage that sustained the existing order seems to have been quick to notice the novelty. He had been careful to declare with due emphasis his loyalty; but in every autocracy the uneasy governing class learns first of all to discount such professions. The poem added to the disfavor in which the official world held him; his aloofness and studious habits seem to have multiplied suspicion. A youth with such sentiments and such ways must be thinking mischief; devilish plottings were irresistibly suggested. So, then, the blacker the mark against his name! The press of Manila, all censored, all edited in behalf of the rulers, seems to have learned early of this proscription. In the stealthy way of the journalistic prostitute it was already giving Rizal warning.[15]
There were other things in his habits not calculated to give pleasurable sensations to sedulous supporters of things as they were. From the beginning of his career at the Ateneo he had taken the position that the Filipino boys were not to serve as door-mats and [[72]]punching-bags for their Spanish fellow-students. He had the courage to insist upon this principle at whatever cost, which was often the breaking of his own head. In all years and all conditions it is character that determines; naturally he became the leader of the Filipinos in all these encounters and led them without flinching. The recluse came from his cell at the sound of battle; the student threw aside schedule and book. He had grown at the Ateneo; he was no longer a midget; and, having kept up his exercises with the rest of his regimen, he could hit hard and take punishment. One side or the other was driven off the field; he contrived to make the retreat a rout if victory sat upon his banners. “Sir, you have wrestled well, and overthrown more than your enemies.” One of these conflicts had, as you are presently to learn, results that he had never counted upon; among them another shadow on a life already troubled enough.
On March 23, 1876, he received the degree of bachelor of arts with the highest honors from the Ateneo, and in April, 1877,[16] matriculated at the ancient university of Santo Tomas.[17] Some of his studies he continued to pursue at the Ateneo, which he always preferred. The choice of a career still weighed upon him; in what way of life, business or profession, could he fit best and furnish the most help? He looked upon the fertile soil of the Islands, he looked upon the medieval methods of cultivation in use there, and he half resolved to be a scientific farmer and show the wonders [[73]]of which the soil was capable. He looked upon the general ignorance of the laws of health among his people and in the end determined to be a physician, choosing diseases of the eye to be his specialty. Oculists were almost unknown in the islands, even poor ones; and diseases of the eye were wide-spread there as in all tropical countries. Every year many Filipinos went blind whose sight science might easily have saved. For lack of competent treatment his own mother was likely to share this dread calamity.