Note 8 — Chapter XVII · RESULTS AND INFLUENCES

Of the veritable basis for these conclusions, so strange in an age and a world that makes of disillusion a fetish, no fair-minded inquirer can have a doubt. It is but the truth that Rizal’s private life has endured the touch as surely as his public career.8 That government of himself he began to learn at the Ateneo, that scorn of the revolt of flesh and fierce determination to put it under the dominion of spirit, he diligently fostered all his life. He had controversies and disputes; he even had quarrels (as we have seen) that might have had deadly outcome; it appears that he did not in any of these lose the perfect control of his temper. The contagion of the world’s slow stain never came near him. He looked upon life and all its phases with a coolly reasoned disdain of all things false. A hundred times he might have saved himself with one only step that the world would have applauded; he would not take that step because it would mean a compromise with the stern, iron-bound Puritan-like standard of virtue he had chosen for himself. No instance has been discovered in him of lies or equivocation. As he himself declared, he had his full share of human frailties and failings, but he managed to avoid those that scar the soul. Some of his jests, it is true, verged upon practical joking, the usual contradiction in men of a melancholy inclining. The wisdom of his marriage, for reasons that need not be gone into here, is now rather more than questionable. On the subject of the capacity of the Filipinos for immediate self-government in his own time, it seems to us clear he was gravely in error. Of the necessity of higher education as a foundation for independence he made far too much. When he held that reforms must needs come from above and could not be expected to be moved from below he must have overlooked some sure lessons of history. That naïve notion of his earlier years, that Spain would for the asking supplant exploitation with altruism was, even in his youth, hardly what men would expect from a mind so original and powerful, so sure and clear. And yet in all his relations to and great services for his country, in his incalculable contributions to the cause of eventual liberty, in his complex relations to science, art, literature, serious and valuable undertakings for the elevation of his fellows, in great trials alike and among the midges of everyday existence, the world may see in him the figure of a man: upright, alert, capable, resolute, patient, resourceful, and without guile.