diced b Jos e S. Arc a, - non

his brother Paciano moved, an atmosphere intimately linked with the mostradical elements of the Philippines as a result of the Revolution of 1868. Ofthese, the most influential was Fr. Jose A. Burgos,12 executed in 1872 foralleged complicity in the mutiny of Cavite and whose death was a traumaticexperience for the boy Pepe Rizal.Reading novels was one of the loves of the young Rizal, he himselfassures us:By this time [1872-1874] I began to dedicate myself in my leisure time to thenovels, although years before I had already read El Ultimo Abencerraje, but Iread it indifferently. Imagine the imagination of a twelve-year old reading TheCount of Monte Christo," enjoying the beauty of their lengthy dialogues andfollowing step by step the heroes in their adventures. Under the pretext ofstudying universal history, I importuned my father to buy me Cesar Cantu, andGod knows how much I profited from reading it . . . despite my half-heartedinterest and insufficient familiarity with the Castilian language.'•If we keep all this in mind, the assertion that the seed of an open andliberal mind (using the word in its widest and most positive sense) began tobear fruit rather early in the young Rizal is not at all surprising. As he himselfwould confess much later, already in 1880 when he was 19 years old, headmired Quixote because, among other masons, he was the "whip thatcastigates and corrects without shedding blood, and instead causeslaughter."" Much less was his early, genuine, and radical feeling for hisnation the result of spontaneous generation.1. Rizal Crosses the "Great Bridge"Leon Ma. Guerrero, one of the more lucid biographers of the Philippinenational hero, has conclusively shown in his day that. Fr. Burgos "had aprofound influence on Rizal."" This is most true, not only in the sense thatBurgos was a model Rizal looked up to, but also in that the ill-starred Filipinopriest strongly influenced the latter's writing."There is, however, a moment when Rizal takes a jump of reallytranscendental consequences, namely, when his mind came into contact withthe cultural world of Europe, the continent he stepped on for the first time in1882 to continue his, medical studies and prepare himself adequately in orderto convert into reality a dream perhaps still half-concretized in its detail, butwhich centered around the recognition of the dignity of his people and theconsecution of their socio-political rights in accordance with the liberalprinciples asserted by the Spaniards for all the citizens of Spain and itscolonies.61