He carried to Madrid his favorite notion of life led by time-tables; and, dividing his day into segments, set apart one for general reading. In this his choice was liberal; anything that would be likely to assist his purpose was welcome. French classics, Shakespeare, Goethe, to help his lingual studies; books on modern political questions; history above everything, any history; biography by way of illustration; and the theater (which he attended as often as his purse would allow) for readjustment.

A book that early captivated him was a volume of the lives of the Presidents of the United States, printed in Spain and in Spanish.[4] It seems to have made a deep impression upon him; he all but wore it out with frequent thumbings, and procured another edition with later biographies that he carried with him wherever he went. These stories of so many picturesque careers to eminence must have had an apt relation to Jagor’s prophecy, a thing he never forgot. The application was too obvious to escape such a mind. In a democracy, men born into the utmost poverty, men born in log huts, the sons of peasants, the sons of artisans, made their way to the highest positions, and not a soul cast their birth at them. It was so; here were the recorded proofs. Under the old monarchical system of society they would have found every door [[83]]shut in their faces and a thousand chains of caste to hold them in the pit where they had been born. In a democracy every door stood open and nothing impeded their ascent. Why does anybody write fiction when fact is so much more dramatic and wonderful? In a student’s cell in a back corner of Madrid was then being forged the wedge of brass that was to overthrow moldering antiquity in all the Pacific and all the Far East, and was so far hidden from the wise and prudent of earth they would have laughed at the mere suggestion of it. Yet there it was, day and night—forging. Well could Prophet Jagor see what was to happen but not the manner of it. He knew that in the end it was the United States that would remake the Philippines, even if at the time he wrote the American people in general were so little acquainted with this part of the sun’s dominions that to many of them Filipino suggested only something to eat; even if he never dreamed that the instrument Fate would use in strange ways to bring all this to pass was in the hand of a slim brown youth naturally addicted to poetry and mooning.

While he was yet in the university, Rizal came into contact with another influence that affected both his career and the story of his country. He became a freemason. Upon all secret societies, but especially upon the freemasons, the governing class in the Philippines had scowled implacably; the friars and the church generally being still more hostile. The governing class in its jumpy way believed that any kind of secret organization must signify treason; the Civil Guards objected because here were keyholes at which [[84]]one could not watch; the friars thought freemasonry threatened the economic welfare of the church. By these, Rizal’s religious convictions were gravely doubted, but need not have been since they were easily ascertained. He was of a broad and sweet faith and a charitable practice, cherishing a universal tolerance refreshing to encounter, but he was in the substance of his belief a loyal Catholic. In his father’s house he had been accustomed to hear religious questions discussed without the least restraint;[5] within those walls Francisco Mercado would have freedom of speech if it existed nowhere else in Filipinas. From such discussions he had learned that religion was a matter about which men would differ widely and yet without just reproach; the independent, courageous, and conscientious man would decide for himself. When he came to understand the subjugation of his country and the part played in that great wrong by the monastic orders his faith in the organized church as the custodian of men’s minds and thinkings faded out, but not his faith in the essentials of the Christian religion, from which he seems never to have wandered.

At the suggestion that freemasonry was or could be a foe to religion he scoffed. Not only did he accept masonry for himself but he resolved that upon his return to the Philippines he would further it among his countrymen. He may have loved it for the enemies it had made; he would have been scarcely human if he had not felt some such impulse. But beyond all such considerations he must have found in the ritual something of beauty and in the associations something of [[85]]the calm and fortitude for which the sorely tried soul yearned within him. We are to remember here again that he was one carried by fate and the stress of conditions out of his inclinings. He had the soul of an artist; by sheer force of will he put himself down into an arena of strife. He loved the cloister, books, and meditation; he forced himself to battle with primitive men for primitive rights. He was a poet, with an ear peculiarly sensitive to sweet sounds, a soul on fire about beauty and its recompenses; and he turned his back upon all these because he thought he heard a call to duty. Some men give their lives to a great cause; some men give still more.

To reinforce the pittance his uncle was able to send him he earned money by tutoring, though to work one’s way through a university was not so easy nor so common at Madrid as we know it in America. He seems to have been a fairly human kind of instructor. According to a letter from one of his class in German he showed an exceedingly human impatience when his pupils failed to grasp his ideas as rapidly as he uttered them.[6]

Throughout all his studies he performed better in languages, history, and belles lettres than in medicine; conclusive proof that he had not followed his own desires but made a sacrifice of them when he chose this profession. We have here his school ratings from 1878 in Manila until the time he left Madrid University; they offer material for an interesting mental clinic if one cares to undertake the exercise: [[86]]

SCHOLASTIC RECORDS OF JOSÉ RIZAL

Studies in Medicine

Studies in Philosophy and Letters