Note 7 — Chapter II · SCHOOL-DAYS AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS

He had the soul of an artist, you may perceive, and the artist’s irresistible yearning for expression. Before he was five years old, and without tutelage or suggestion, he began to draw with pencil and to model in clay and wax. It was form that most took his attention; to model images of birds, butterflies, dogs, and men, to draw faces and to outline designs.7 For such studies his surroundings could hardly have been better; as soon as his bent was shown father, mother, and uncles gave him every encouragement; this is a race that upon any manifestation of artistic promise looks with a kind of solemn joy. Uncle José Alberto, his mother’s half-brother, had been a school-teacher as well as a student abroad; Uncle Gregorio was a great reader; the atmosphere of the house was friendly to study. After the Philippine manner it was grave, decorous, reserved; for there is not on earth, one may believe, a people by nature more serious-minded. The family was happy to have the benignant friendship of Father Lopez, the parish priest, a fair antithesis of the typical friar of those days and a noble inheritor of the purest spirit of the first missions. Father Lopez was beloved of all the children of the parish. They had sound reason for their affection; there was no kinder or more useful man. The friendship he maintained with José seemed more like a page out of Charles Dickens than the barren realities of ordinary child life in the Philippines, and the priest to have stepped from some new and Spanish version of “Christmas Stories.” The boy was to learn by painful experience how different from certain others of the cloth was the gentle old curate of Calamba.