To the profession he had chosen he surrendered nothing of his addiction to the arts; he modeled, painted, drew, and sang as before. Without yielding to the extravagant eulogy that has attended his fame in recent years, it appears certain that he was in art one of those rare creatures that are endowed at once with two great faculties. He could create and he could analyze; he could feel and he could reason; and on either side his activities could be carried on with the same native ease.
About the time he was entering Santo Tomas the Lyceum staged another poetic tourney, this time to celebrate the glory of Cervantes. Rizal was a competitor with an allegory called “The Council of the Gods,” in which he developed a critical exposition of Cervantes and his art, lucid, just, and competent; as remarkable a production as the imaginative part of his work. The awarding of the prizes in this competition resulted in a painful incident that took its place in the chain of fateful things now drawing him away. Mystery surrounds the facts and always will, but it appears that the competitors entered the lists [[74]]with assumed names, and that Rizal won the first prize; but when he was discovered to be a Filipino the laurel was taken from him and bestowed upon a Spaniard.[18] It was a slash in the old wound; not even in that domain of art, supposed to have shut doors upon the prejudices of nation and birth, was the Filipino to be allowed to forget his inferiority. His fellows at the Ateneo felt that he had been wronged, and knowledge of the general resentment took nothing from the ill will with which he was viewed by the governing class. In all lands it is the fate of the foreign colony to be swayed by puerile emotions; among these in the Spanish colony of Manila suspicion led all the rest.
Meantime his fate was crying out to him in strange voices that led him, before he was aware, into the road from the Philippines. At the Ateneo the students were fond of enacting plays of their own devising. Rizal was poet and dramatist; here was the plain call to his favorite pursuit. He wrote for his fellows a metrical drama called “Beside the Pasig,” and on December 8, 1880, it was publicly performed by one of the student societies. Courage he had never lacked, the courage of a mind too reasonable to be deluded by fear. He showed now what he had in his heart. One of the characters in his drama was the devil himself. Into the mouth of Sathanas he put (with a dazzling audacity) a sentence denouncing Spain and her policy toward the Philippines.
There are single colorations of character that sometimes reveal and illuminate the whole man. This was one of them. Disclosed here was a certain precise, [[75]]firm touch of workmanship as typical as was the pluck demanded to say such a thing. The perfect barbing of the satirical arrow no Philippine audience could miss; Spain so bad that the devil himself condemned her! Nothing could be more poisonous. But among the persons whose attention was enchained by the daring flight of fancy were members of the Government’s secret service. To keep watch against such young enthusiasts tempted to raillery upon the existing order was a chief point in their varied and malign industry, and in this instance the author of these burning thoughts was no stranger to them. Even if the bold iconoclast had never shocked right-minded people by calling the Philippines his fatherland, he must have been from the first an object of suspicion to the souls that could find sedition in the drooping of an eyebrow. Brother of Paciano Rizal, son of Francisco Rizal Mercado, should aught but evil come of that stock? To these ferrets, his outbreaks in verse must have been no more than the fulfilment of prophecy.
Then, again, Rizal did not like Santo Tomas. He was galled to think that its methods of instruction lagged behind those of the Ateneo, which it should have led. He knew well enough that the cold frown of hostility was turned upon him by the friar professors. Santo Tomas was Dominican; the Ateneo was Jesuit. In Rizal’s case jealousy between the two orders was added to the heavy handicap he must pay as a reputed insurgent against the System. The Jesuits had sent forth this prize-winning prodigy. Logically, then, the other orders were constrained to sniff at him.
He had other encounters with the System that in [[76]]so many and diverse ways wearied his people. One night when he was visiting his mother at Calamba he came, half blinded, out of the lighted house into the darkness of the street and dimly perceived passing him the figure of a man. Not knowing who or what it was, Rizal said nothing and made no movement. With a snarl, the figure turned upon him, whipped out a sword, and slashed him across the back. It was a Civil Guard—so called. Rizal’s duty as a Filipino under the barbarous code of the times was to make a salute whenever he might see one of these strutting persons. Spaniards need not salute; only Filipinos. If he had known that this was one of the precious police Rizal would have performed the important ceremony and so fulfilled his obligation to king and country. As in the dark the policeman looked like anybody else he thought it hard to be wounded for not possessing the vision of a cat. The injury was painful but not serious. When he recovered, he deemed it his duty to report to the authorities what had occurred. Jeering indifference was all his reward. An Indio had no rights that a Civil Guard was bound to respect, and instead of complaining Rizal should be offering thanks that the offended soldier had not taken his life.
All these experiences must have weighed together, but it was the political aspect of his plight, no doubt, that decided him. He had set out in life resolved to win the best education his times and his means might allow; for himself and more, for his cause much greater than himself. He now began to see that in his country, and even because of his love for it, he would [[77]]be debarred from the knowledge and training he desired for its sake. Often the sage old counselors had told him to look abroad for that training, not at home. Most Filipinos that had won any eminence had first escaped from the evil environment of their nativity. So long as he could he resisted these arguments. The lost prize seems to have completed the business for him. He made up his mind to get the rest of his education abroad.
To go was not so easy as to dream of going. He must have a passport, and of all men in Manila he was the last to which the Government would allow that or any other favor; the patriot poet, the singer of the “fatherland,” the critic of Spain, suspected of sowing treason in the minds of youths at best none too docile. Through the help of a cousin and his own ingenuity, he evaded this difficulty and all others. The cousin got a passport in another name. Paciano and an uncle supplied funds;[19] a sister gave him a diamond ring to pawn. To outwit official suspicion, José went to Calamba ostensibly to visit his family, and really to wait until a vessel should be ready to sail. A cryptic telegram gave him the warning. He slipped into Manila and after midnight stole aboard his steamer. When day broke he was well on his way to Singapore.[20] [[78]]
[1] The professor speaks these words in the vulgar dialect. [↑]