Rizal was fond of physical exercise and so was I. We practised fencing together and soon became good and close friends.

He was simple in his manners, but profound in his studies and researches, analytical in his mental processes, reflective rather than sentimental. He was extremely methodical and industrious; I never saw him idle. He had great confidence in himself, was firm in his faith, resourceful in the solving of a difficult situation, swift and sure in his decisions. His habit was to answer without hesitation and succinctly any question that might be put to him; he had never to hunt for an idea or a word. He was the most loyal of friends; anything he possessed was at his friend’s disposal. He was courteous, affectionate, affable, sincere, but rather serious. His mental state may be judged from the mass of material he contributed to “La Solidaridad,” so varied, so forceful and so carefully prepared.

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Wherever he went, he seemed without effort to make friends of all men that came near him. Set down in a steamer full of strangers, he would be noted at once by every passenger and before dinner was served would be on good terms with most of the persons on board, crew included. Yet, strange to say, he seldom smiled, usually seemed distrait in the midst of others’ mirth, and was sometimes lost in gloomy musing, when he seemed all unaware of his surroundings. In the opinion of his friends, he had almost no self-consciousness; certainly, all his life he hated affectations and never lost a chance to scorch them with his terrible sarcasm; for this man of the world, ordinarily so suave and courteous that he won good will even among his enemies, had certain reserve funds of censuring speech he could make as bitter as gall. Whether he sat, walked, stood, talked, or listened he was always natural, always composed, and always the sure master of himself. When he went through the United States he noticed that the men there conversed without gesticulating, contrary to the practice of the Spaniards and most Europeans. On reflection he deemed the practice to lend strength to utterance and thereafter made it a rule to keep his hands still while he talked.

The image of a man that seldom smiled and yet so easily won his fellows to like him seems out of the drawing of nature and yet in this case is essentially true. There was in Rizal’s face something almost irresistibly winning. Good will looked out of it and warm human sympathy and a kind of downright sincerity that found a way to the notice of even the dullest. It seemed to one studying him attentively [[208]]that on the original lines of a being all love, gentleness, and meditation had been stamped later a great melancholy and a great and high resolve. Lowly men seemed to understand instinctively something in him they could never have formulated nor described, something friendly and good; and men of learning turned with a similar impulse to a mind that showed itself so wealthy and still so unpretending.

He loved music, was a good judge of it, and composed it readily and well. He loved flowers as all other things beautiful—of course, being an artist born and the instinct ineradicable in him! That charming poem of his, “The Flowers of Heidelberg”[3] was written in the intervals between his pursuits of the most advanced discoveries and driest facts in ophthalmology, surgery, ethnology, entomology, anthropology, and the penning of some of the fiercest passages of condensed wrath to be found in any language. It is likely that he saw nothing grotesque in these abrupt transitions; perfectly sincere men have little time for such nice questionings. If we regard the making of poetry as the serious business of his soul, which it was, his chief intellectual relaxation was chess, of which, by the time of his second visit to Madrid, he had become a notable player.[4]

REMNANTS FROM RIZAL’S LIBRARY

He had as little vanity as any man conscious of his powers could reasonably have. Yet he was always careful of his appearance and took pains to dress well, after the most modest taste. Even when he was poverty-stricken in Berlin and living on a daily bowl of [[209]]coffee and piece of bread, he would allow himself no laxity in his attire.

Once he wrote of some pupils of his that he was teaching them to behave like men.[5] It was a point of weight with him. His conception of a man was one that had at all times himself in full command. This virtue he had practised assiduously from those old days at the Ateneo when first he perceived its splendors; and now he was so truly captain of his own soul that, as we have seen, he could endure privations, subdue appetites, and urge himself along his road by the sheer force of his will. He was the greater part of his life desperately poor; yet if he had been willing to practise his profession for gain a great fortune was within his grasp. In whatsoever conditions he found himself he still tried to adhere to that plan he had adopted at the Ateneo of apportioning his day according to a schedule. He was more careful of his time than a miser of his gold; he would waste no hour. To his friends he admitted that when he sat silent in company and seemed to be moody he was composing his next article for “La Solidaridad” or a new chapter in one of his books. He was the least superstitious of men, but for years he had a presentiment that he would die by shooting. Once crossing Bagumbayan Field he pointed to the place of execution and said to a companion, “On that spot I shall some day be put to death by a firing-squad.” As a final light upon a singular character, it is to be noted that he was not oppressed by this foreboding. It was accompanied in his mind, as nearly as one can discern, with a conviction [[210]]that the cause for which he stood must have its victims, and to this extent and no farther showed in him the fatalism supposed to be a distinctive trait of the Malay.

He was ordinarily so calm, so self-contained, so much the example of the reasoning man and the like, that it seems highly incongruous to think of him as a duelist; yet twice he challenged to mortal combat. It appears that under his coolly borne exterior there was fire, and even his beautiful faith in the supremacy of reason had not eradicated all the Old Adam from his blood. He seems never to have thought that the violence he contemplated was nothing but a minute specimen of the war-making he denounced, nor that in sending challenges he reverted from his most cherished doctrines. Perhaps if the inconsistency had been pointed out to him then it would not have disturbed him, and certainly it is a hobgoblin that need not disturb us now. If the queer bundle of nerves that is called man never presented a greater irrelevancy, admiration for him need molt no feather. Both of the quarrels, if so they might be called, that brought out the fighting instinct in the gentle artist-student resulted from incidents in Madrid when he returned there in 1890. W. E. Retana, who had been press-agent in Manila for the friars, was now a Madrid journalist and printed in his newspaper a vicious and baseless attack upon Rizal wherein he sought, doubtless, to revenge the friars on the author of “Noli Me Tangere.” Without delay Rizal sent him a challenge. Mr. Retana seems to have had no appetite to go afield; he published a retraction and apology and the quarrel [[211]]ended.[6] Rather oddly, Retana, who had been in Manila the bitter foe of the Filipino cause and of all its champions (though possibly on a commercial basis), became, after this incident, first the friend and then the biographer of Rizal.