Note 10 — Chapter IV · VOICES OF PROPHECY

With all his other occupations he found time to press the work on his great book, until he had completed in it an exposition of the full body of his faith. Perhaps in the way of construction it is not so much a novel as a series of vivid pictures of life in the Philippines of that time; but with a strangely vivifying necromancy difficult to analyze or define, the power of these pictures is hardly excelled in modern literature.10 We may believe that the secret of this compelling power is the intensity of Rizal’s feeling; it gives to his portraitures a sincerity and virility no striving and no art could come by. He obeyed, unconsciously, the Sidneyan injunction about the heart and the writing; some of the passages seem to be done in his blood and some in his tears. The test of their might is easily made. Take to-day a reader that has never been in the Philippines and knows nothing of the peculiar life there; when he has read “Noli Me Tangere” he will not only feel that he knows that life but it will be to him as if he had seen it, as if he had heard these characters talking, noted their visages, and discerned their motives no less than their acts. All this he will feel in spite of the insulating septum of translation, against which all the finer beauties of the style must fall dead; the terse, vigorous, often biting sentences through which this tortured heart uttered its protest, and even the almost magical charm of the descriptions of the Philippine environment.