Note 11 — Chapter IV · VOICES OF PROPHECY

To be thus vivid and convincing about any phase of life is not easy; to make intimate to the European a life in the world’s remotest outskirts, of whose terms the European has no conception, in which he has no natural interest, whose actors are of a different race, color, and psychology from his own, is a feat bristling with difficulties. Some critics, piqued, maybe, that a Malay at his first attempt should have triumphed in a form of art deemed the exclusive heritage of the white man, have objected that Rizal’s work has no great connected moving story, such as Dickens or Ohnet would have dealt in. Suppose this to be true, it is but a narrow view of fictional art. The mirror fiction holds up to nature may be of many shapes, and the life chosen for mirroring may be of many phases. All that the world can insist upon is that they shall be representative and perfectly shown, and for these Rizal had a facility like that of Cervantes.11