Three years elapsed between the bestowing of his licentiate in medicine and the taking of his degree. The lapse was never explained by Rizal, but the reason was his poverty. His father was now in much distress, and Rizal to prosecute his studies must live with narrow scrimping and sometimes on crusts. He could not afford to pay the fee for his doctor’s degree and went without it until his fortunes mended. [[88]]

But his record of triumphs in philosophy and letters must have balanced all possible regrets for the lack of this laurel while it added to his great fame in the student world. So many scholarships, honors, mentions, “excellents”!—these were the prizes he had won with so much industry. The plan of his career he had now worked out to his satisfaction: he was to visit the foremost countries of Europe, study their institutions, learn the secrets of their progress, and carry home to his countrymen information that might spur them to cast off their lethargy and emerge from the national eclipse. Meantime, he was to perfect himself in his profession that he might add to his usefulness and take up his work among them. From Madrid, therefore, he went to Paris, where he became clinical assistant to Dr. L. de Weckert, one of the most famous oculists of Europe.[7]

It was in Paris that he took the first direct steps to his own ruin. While still in Madrid he had come upon the idea of addressing his countrymen through the medium of a novel. He had been reading and studying Mrs. Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and he pondered with awe the far-reaching effect upon history and human progress of that inspired work. The thought occurred to him that similarly wrought pictures of the servitude of the Filipinos might awaken them to a knowledge of the yoke that was slowly crushing them, pictures that might at the same time reveal to the world the justice of the Filipino cause. He went so far as to suggest such a work to the Filipino club at Madrid, the story to be of joint authorship; [[89]]for he seems to have had doubts of his own ability. When his fellow-members failed to see how great were the opportunities involved he was driven back upon himself, as he so often had been and was to be. From Madrid to Paris the idea grew upon him. At Paris he took his pen and started seriously upon the composition of a story of Philippine life.

This was the beginning of “Noli Me Tangere,” the greatest work in Philippine literature and one of the great achievements of all times and all lands. He was not perfectly equipped to be a novelist, for he had not the great dramatic fictional sense that sees a moving tale in the large and coördinates to the catastrophe every incident as the plot unfolds; but he had assets many dramatic fictionists never possess. He had the compelling fire of a lofty indignation, the sense of a great cause, the faultless knowledge of the hearts and minds and sorrows of the people of his little stage. He had something else that put him in a class with Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and William Dean Howells. He was a great reporter. Nature had gifted him with a marvelous power of observation; as truly as with his pencil he made those startling and hardly surpassed sketches of men and things, so accurately his mind seized and stored the significance of incidents, conversations, petty broils, clashing ambitions, village tyrants, unsung Hampdens, and cities of men and manners.

He wrote in Paris the opening chapters of “Noli Me Tangere” and carried them to Heidelberg, where the next year he was a student at the university.[8] [[90]]

By this time he had begun to attract the attention of scientists for zealot-like devotion to his scientific research. At Madrid, Paris, Heidelberg, he was first the student and then the close friend and coadjutor of the foremost oculists of that time. It appears that upon his capacity and powers of concentration, which were extraordinary, they founded large hopes of a brilliant professional career. Despite his preoccupation and his aloofness, it is equally apparent that he exercised upon them the charm of a singularly magnetic manner. Readily he made friends; as easily he kept them. To the end of his life some of the greatest scientists in Europe, men like Virchow, Jagor, Blumentritt, and de Weckert held him in affectionate esteem and delighted to correspond with him.

They had sound human reasons for liking him. In addition to so liberal a store of other good gifts, this man was a master of the now rare art of letter-writing. To the family at home he sent the most charming epistles, full of shrewd observations, colorful descriptions, and a cheerful wit. Often they were illustrated with his incomparable thumb-nail drawings and humorous designs, and sometimes when he wrote to his mother he sent her the latest poems on which he had been engrossed.[9]

From Heidelberg he went to Leipzig and its university, studying, in especial, psychology; thence to Berlin, where he took cheap lodgings and settled himself to complete his novel while he should still pursue his [[91]]studies; for besides his specialties he had lately taken on anthropology and entomology.

His association with Virchow enlarged and enlightened his views concerning democracy and overcame much of the grave disadvantages of his birth. Men born under a monarchy have always this to overcome if they are to become effective soldiers of the Common Good. Virchow was a philosophical democrat that had seen, as in a long perspective, the ascent of man and had drawn thence an unshakable faith. Although Rizal was now more than ever a democrat, on calmly reviewing the state of his countrymen he believed that for his day the national independence of the Philippines was out of the question. Memories of the popular ignorance oppressed him. To be free, he thought, a people must know how to use freedom. It seems not to have occurred to him that there was no school but one in which that precious wisdom could be taught, and in it were and could be no text-books. For, whatever scholiasts may imagine and Utopians dream, it is experience and experience alone that tutors man in the good use of his freedom. The theory that a nation must wait until all its men have university degrees before it can be trusted with its destinies is either the dishonest handmaid of exploitation or, as in Rizal’s case, the footless product of the cloisters. Man, endowed with freedom, will use it wrongly and use it rightly; and which is the right way and which the wrong he will not know until responsibility enlightens him. After all, it is not wholly strange that even so excellent a mind as Rizal’s should have gone astray [[92]]on this point; for he was codisciple of the schoolmen, and in his day schoolmen taught only his error. We need not on this account lower any estimate of his worth and genius. He could see that if in his day and with their antecedents the people of the Philippines should suddenly arrive at their independence they would probably make for a time but erratic use of it. What he could not see was that at its worst their condition then would be better than the blight and curse of their previous state, and that under the tuition of experience they would work out their problems and vindicate their capacity.