Note 6 — Chapter XI · WHAT MANNER OF MAN

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 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.