[7] “La Solidaridad” was started by Graciano Lopez Jaena at Barcelona. Del Pilar took charge of it in October, 1887, and moved it to Madrid to be nearer the centers of action. Compare Blair and Robertson, Vol. LII, p. 176. [↑]
[8] Retana, p. 199; Blair and Robertson, Vol. LII, p. 178. [↑]
[9] “The Reign of Greed” (“El Filibusterismo”), pp. 86–87; Derbyshire’s translation. [↑]
[10] Between “Noli Me Tangere” and “El Filibusterismo” is a vast difference. We speak of novels. In “Noli Me Tangere” all is fresh, ingenuous, impetuous; it is a novel that impresses one in such a way that it is never forgotten; it is a work of feeling. “El Filibusterismo” is a work of deep thought, and in literature it must be remembered that sentiment is preferred to thought. “Noli Me Tangere” is a picture of the whole country, rich in color and in fantasy, entwined with the dreams of a delicate poetry. “El Filibusterismo” came to be a series of philosophical-political treatises with a novelistic trend; every speech that appears in the work ends in a patriotic dissertation. “Noli Me Tangere” is the unbosoming of an enlightened poet, passionately patriotic, artistically revolutionary. “El Filibusterismo” is a series of [[170]]meditations; it lacks the admixture of humor, of semi-sweet irony that produces such an effect in the first book. It despises the attacks of the religious fanatics, threatens with Voltairian sharpness. The ambient air of the tropics is not felt, charged full of melancholy, which is to be breathed in “Noli Me Tangere.” Rizal wrote his first novel having constantly before his dreamy fantasy the vision of his country as it was. In the second he wrote thinking of the redemption of his race, elevating the philosopher above the artist. “Noli Me Tangere” is a novel; “El Filibusterismo” is a tract on the national anarchy. Retana, p. 201. [↑]
[11] It was published in Ghent. The title-page bears this imprint: “Gent: Boekdrukkerij F. Meyer-Van Loo, Vlaanderstraat, 67. 1891.” Rizal was now able to defray from his own means the cost of publication. The Madrid newspaper, “El Nuevo Régimen,” published in October, 1891, “extensive extracts” from the novel; so did “La Publicidad” of Barcelona. Not a line of it was printed in the Philippines until 1900. Four years later it was translated into Tagalog. [↑]
CHAPTER IX
PHILIPPINE INDEPENDENCE
Sixteen years after Jagor printed his almost unheeded prophecy, other men less gifted might have seen that his views on Philippine evolution were soundly based. The conditions existing in the Islands could not last much longer. Six or seven discontented millions could not continue to be overawed with soldiery and great guns and managed upon a plan they hated. No matter how assiduously they might be kept from all weapons more deadly than jack-knives and toothpicks, the existing state could not endure. The mere physical fact of the United States, forging ahead upon a totally different principle, would be an influence that soon or late would overturn these sagging bulwarks of antiquity. What was to be the future of the Islands? For a long time the students of Barcelona tried to settle this question, sometimes with debate and sometimes with vociferation. Thence with similar futility it spread to Madrid and elsewhere, and finally Rizal took it up in a series of articles entitled “The Philippines a Century Hence.”[1] [[173]]
What he thought about Philippine independence he here set down as plainly as the law and the Spanish Government would allow. That any one should try to muddle his views on this subject is strange enough when he left thus a testament reasonably explicit in its text and still more in its deductions. Although much latitude was allowed to public discussion in the Spain of that day, plotting to overthrow Spanish rule in the Philippines was still sedition, and under that term the police sometimes included much that was extraneous—in Spain, as elsewhere. Rizal had no fear for himself on this occasion nor any other, but one can easily understand that he wished to save “La Solidaridad” from the ash-can. Hence with admirable skill he steers as close as he can to the forbidden line and yet escapes it.