Note 9 — Chapter III · FIRST CONTACTS WITH THE ENEMY

But from these adventures he came back to the sobering facts of his mission as the business and only reality of life. To contribute something to the helping and enlightening of these people was his métier and the only thing really important. A many-sided man, as you shall see. With all the laborious exactions of his time schedule, he could still continue his worship of art and beauty; he kept on with his modeling, kept on with his painting and poetry. His holidays he sometimes spent with his mother at Calamba; and his habit was to go home to her with a pocketful of verses of his recent making. That excellent woman and judicious critic set herself to clarify and direct the fire thus burning.9 She must have succeeded after good models, for Rizal freshened the laurels of his Ateneo triumphs by winning prizes beyond its intellectual tiltyards. The Manila Lyceum of Art and Literature founded a competition among Filipino poets, “naturales y mestizos.”10 Rizal won it with a poem entitled “To the Philippine Youth.”11 From a point of view that was never urged he had no right to win it: the Lyceum was supposed to be for adults, and he was only eighteen years old. But the subject had called forth the best that was in him; it offered a chance to preach his favorite theme, to appeal to his young countrymen, and to stir in them something of the passion that moved him, while he suggested the Filipinas that might be.12