The other altercation was with Antonio Luna,[7] afterward a famous commander in the army of the Philippine Republic. About a woman of Rizal’s acquaintance Luna made an unworthy remark, and Rizal sent him a challenge. Having possibly regained sobriety meanwhile, Luna withdrew the remark and apologized for it, whereupon the quarrel was made up without mortal arbitrament. In his chivalrous and unsullied attitude toward women Rizal was true to the finest traditions of his race. Among the faults of the Filipinos, lechery is assuredly not included. Except the Irish, no other people on earth have a higher conception of chastity and sex morality, nor adhere to it with greater tenacity. Retana wrote that Rizal had “a truly upright moral sense.” It was but an inadequate tribute. He was a champion of righteousness; his religion was like Wendell Phillips’s, “a battle not a dream.” When he wrote, “The good of my country, that is all I pursue,” he was not making platform epigrams but telling what the records confirm.
We have spoken of the purity of his conduct; at least as wonderful is the fact that he left so little [[212]]trace of a selfish aim. Other men with great work to do have had all of his indifference to wealth; what classifies him as above all these is his far rarer indifference to the nobler ambitions for fame and power that have beset so many others in his position and wrecked so many good causes. He sought no place, looked for no honor, cared for applause as little as finite man could be expected to care, seemed to have no yearning for ease nor for pleasure. The lust of the eyes, and that fatal lure, the joy of warming oneself in the sun of one’s own glory tripped him not. We may admit that the balance to be drawn from these facts is not wholly a human figure; one looks for the faults that have disfigured so many other national heroes and the things that laurel-bearing biographers labor deftly to conceal. There seems to be nothing to conceal about this man. And if the tale of his virtues seems at times overwrought so that we might be relieved to find somewhere that he swore, was easily angered, or chewed tobacco or fought a cabman, we are to remember that as his ideals bore him to unusual heights, so it was an unusual condition that forced him early in life to surrender every purpose but the emancipation of his country. And when we have made all allowances for the power of this ambition that swept him along, the fact will remain and be inevitable in the records that here was a strange figure to walk in upon us in the nineteenth century from the ends of the earth.
There remains to be noted a singular fact about that leadership of his people, forced upon him as we have noted, and not of his designing or plotting. With his [[213]]prestige and the popularity that was the certain consequence of a success so gratifying to the hurt national pride, he had but to make a gesture to his countrymen and they would have followed him over the smoking ruins of Malacañan or any other place, fighting with bolos if they could come by no rifles. It was a temptation to dramatics on the world stage that few men could have resisted. What reality of stern virtue, worthier of a legendary age than of his own times, was in this man may be gaged from the fact that he not so much resisted the temptation as ignored it. Perhaps to him it was no temptation; at least he may be thought of as living in his inner and real self, where such things weighed nothing. The time demanded from a revolutionary leader a proclamation and loud cheers; he met it with a learned treatise on taxation and how taxation might be improved. Bitter are the penalties that attend a dark skin! But for his complexion the world would class him with its purest and best, with Washington and William the Silent, Phocion and Brutus, Garrison and Wendell Phillips, and the rest of the scanty band that, having great tasks thrust upon them, forgot themselves and their tenements of clay to think only of the Common Good.
As to how José Rizal would stand such a test applied to his career and all of it, take this testimony of Retana, who from antecedent probability at least would invent no extravagance of praise. Even in his youth, said Retana, every injustice, every crime, every wrong, struck home to his sensibilities. He walked with unsmirched garments through a world filled with the reek of a sordid time and the cruelty that man [[214]]works upon man, trying to make a protest against all oppressions and busy to the end with the troubles of his fellows but not with his own.
To this sketch of his moral self, not less engaging than his physical portraiture, remains to be added one line. Pursued indefatigably by bigotry and prejudice, he was himself of a singular tolerance. The wrongs of his people he resented with towering indignation, and his own he viewed with an astonishing calm. To the gibes and sneers and taunts of his foes he had but the one habitual response:
“To understand all is to forgive all!” [[215]]
[1] These and the succeeding particulars are communicated or verified by friends that knew him in Madrid at this time, had been in the university with him or observed him later. [↑]
[2] In a letter to the present authors. [↑]
[3] See [Appendix A]. [↑]