But we have to deal here with the unfolding of this marvelous man and the heritage of his deeds and thought. He meditated long upon the unfortunate state of his people; he saw them bogged in ignorance and blinded by superstition, and hence he concluded that until there should be popular education, independence would mean only failure and temporary reversion. Of the eventual freedom of the Philippines, as of their eventual greatness and glory among men, he had never a doubt.
Meantime, the first work in hand was to arouse these people to the need of education and to wrest from Spain by peaceful means some practical relief from the savage tyranny that weighed down their hearts, darkened their lives, and of purpose kept them in ignorance.
With all his other occupations he found time to press the work on his great book, until he had completed in it an exposition of the full body of his faith. Perhaps in the way of construction it is not so much a [[93]]novel as a series of vivid pictures of life in the Philippines of that time; but with a strangely vivifying necromancy difficult to analyze or define, the power of these pictures is hardly excelled in modern literature.[10] We may believe that the secret of this compelling power is the intensity of Rizal’s feeling; it gives to his portraitures a sincerity and virility no striving and no art could come by. He obeyed, unconsciously, the Sidneyan injunction about the heart and the writing; some of the passages seem to be done in his blood and some in his tears. The test of their might is easily made. Take to-day a reader that has never been in the Philippines and knows nothing of the peculiar life there; when he has read “Noli Me Tangere” he will not only feel that he knows that life but it will be to him as if he had seen it, as if he had heard these characters talking, noted their visages, and discerned their motives no less than their acts. All this he will feel in spite of the insulating septum of translation, against which all the finer beauties of the style must fall dead; the terse, vigorous, often biting sentences through which this tortured heart uttered its protest, and even the almost magical charm of the descriptions of the Philippine environment.
To be thus vivid and convincing about any phase of life is not easy; to make intimate to the European a life in the world’s remotest outskirts, of whose terms the European has no conception, in which he has no natural interest, whose actors are of a different race, color, and psychology from his own, is a feat bristling [[94]]with difficulties. Some critics, piqued, maybe, that a Malay at his first attempt should have triumphed in a form of art deemed the exclusive heritage of the white man, have objected that Rizal’s work has no great connected moving story, such as Dickens or Ohnet would have dealt in. Suppose this to be true, it is but a narrow view of fictional art. The mirror fiction holds up to nature may be of many shapes, and the life chosen for mirroring may be of many phases. All that the world can insist upon is that they shall be representative and perfectly shown, and for these Rizal had a facility like that of Cervantes.[11]
The theme is the gross, fat-witted tyranny that had enchained the Filipinos and the extent to which they themselves were to blame for it. Neither oppressor nor the complaisant among the oppressed was spared in those cadent pictures; here each might behold his ugly countenance faultlessly drawn. With bitter reproach he showed to his countrymen their ignorance, their sloth, their tame submission that invited more wrongs. In all human experience one observation has been invariable. It is that the force that rules with autocratic and irresponsible sway is able to bear anything else better than ridicule. The ridicule that Rizal poured upon the dominant powers in the Philippines would have stung to the quick Caracalla himself. One by one he marches them across the stage, the whip of his terrible sarcasm always on their shoulders. It is an immortal procession: the scheming, arrogant, lawless, immoral friar, drunk with power and greed; the Spanish government officer, all brute to the native, all [[95]]crawling sycophant before the powerful orders; the arrogant Spanish émigré, stuffed with the ridiculous bombast of a bygone century, the émigré that has become rich in the islands at the expense of the native and now hates and despises the rounds of the ladder by which he did ascend; the native that cringes before the feet of the classes that have so unspeakably wronged him; the woman of Spain’s Island colony, “more deadly than the male”; the pretentious and all but worthless educational system; the raw excesses of the courts; the wanton cruelties of a Government conducted by expatriated savages; the tortures and pathetic helplessness of the native masses. On all this the man worked like Hogarth; he will startle and frighten you, but he will convince you on every page that this is the truth. In this misery, exactly this, dwelt the unfortunate millions that Spain misgoverned; in this terror, thus trampled upon, overawed, silenced, but not subdued. These were the people’s oppressors, lustful, cruel, rapacious, their burning eyes following every pretty woman or girl, their pockets lined with the peasants’ money, their claws reaching for more. All the scenes of the drama and all the players in it, drawn with irresistible art: the Civil Guards, the coarse instruments of this despotism; the means by which terror was capitalized; the constant temptation to revolt; the devilish work of the agents provocateurs; the sickening punishments devised for those that yielded to the wiles of such agents.[12] Against this shone the native grace and charm of the Filipino woman, justly illumined, her goodness, kindness, [[96]]ready and apprehensive mind, the pitfalls dug for her by the bestial oppressors of her people. You will say that all the materials are here for one of those great dramas of human life that reach down to the primeval base of first causes and of such framing this book has been made.
Everywhere is dense ignorance. The world that three hundred years before left all these conditions behind still goes rolling in advance, and hardly a Filipino knows of its passing. A great population endowed with the potentialities of free minds, free limbs, free souls, free ideas, is submitting to a yoke pressed down into men’s very flesh by superstition on one side and brute force on the other.
We know that many of the incidents were but transcripts of what Rizal himself had seen and known; many of the characters transferred themselves from Calamba to his pages. Even when we read them for the first time, and have, maybe, no previous knowledge of the locale, this conviction of truth and sincerity possesses us; how much more it must have reached and stung those whose enormities it paints! “It is only the truth that hurts.” [[97]]
[1] Craig, p. 117; Retana, p. 59; Derbyshire, p. xxvii. [↑]
[2] While he was in the Philippines on the occasion of his first return there, 1887, he had with him a considerable collection of books in many languages but scarcely any in Spanish. A friend once called his attention to this fact and asked why he omitted Spanish books. “Well,” said Rizal, in his quiet way but with a twinkle in his eyes, “if they can’t read them they will not borrow them, will they?” [↑]