2 October 1891

Barcelona

A critical appraisal of El Filibusterismo – Superior to the Noli – Exquisite style, sublime thoughts – At the beginning “light, alluring hopes; at the end shadows of doubt and despair” – Simoun ought to have succumbed like a hero, shot with the bullets, or like Porthos or Bernardo el Carpio – Rizal should write another book which solves the problems and hastens the day of our redemption – Graciano wants to meet Rizal at Marseille before his departure – Those of the Madrid Colony do not understand one another – Luna at the point of rebelling against del Pilar – El Baguio is not yet published.

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Barcelona, 2 October 1891

MR. JOSE RIZAL

Ghent

MY DEAR RIZAL,

I have received form Vicente Reyes a copy of your new work inscribed to me. I thank you for the present and I congratulate you sincerely.

Candour and frankness prevailing among friends and countrymen, my impartial, personal, especially my own opinion of your recent production, inasmuch as you ask me for it in your letter to Vicente, is the following:

El Filibusterismo is a superior novel to your Noli me Tangere in its exquisite, delicate literary style, its easy and correct dialogue, its clean, vigorous, and elegant phraseology, as much as for its profound ideas and sublime thoughts.

The development is magnificent and of original effects.

I am charmed by the whole, having surpassed my expectations.

However, you begin the novel very alluringly like Dumas and you conclude it dryly like Sue.[1]

Here is the defect, if it is a defect, of your great work.

Your beginning in your recent production is sublime, poetic like the red clouds of dawn that spread on the horizon, brilliant, clear, announcing a good and beautiful day; however, our conclusion is like the evening twilight, saturated with heavy mist.

You begin by encouraging heroic passions, infusing, inspiring, alluring, beautiful hopes, golden illusions, dragging the masses towards glory, and you end by filling the mind with black shadows, making the heart overflow with cruel anguish.

Your beginning, like Dumas’, is light, much light, magnificence, hope, gay dawn of day, rose-colored future, glory, immortality; but your ending, like Sue’s, shrivels the heart, plugging the mind into the nebulous abyss of despair.

In my opinion, I believe that, as you present to the eyes of the Filipino people Simoun, attractive, great, generous, though depraved in certain stages, but behind his depravity and feigned, conventional wickedness, you endow him with a brave heart, full of noble desires, you ought to have killed him at the end of the novel, converted into a hero, either killed in some battle or in the flames of a formidable fire, or wounded by a thunderbolt, or crushed by the cataclysm of an imposing earthquake, and you would have succeeded to give your work a magnificent crown.

You have left the problem unsolved.

As a political novel, your ending is not a worthy conclusion of so beautiful a work.

I would have liked to see Simoun succumb magnanimously, if not shot by the bullets of the invading enemy, as you rightly call the Kastila, under an immense mass like that Porthos of the immortal Dumas, preserving until death his iron energy and Herculean strength; or like Bernardo el Carpio, according to Philippine folklore, pressed between the cleft of two mountains that are drawing to each other, prevents with his strong arms the violent class of both, but shouting upon seeing the approach of death with head high and the face serene: “I haven’t come to fight nature’s commotions; I’ve risen, I’ve wished to fight not the thunderbolt or the lightning, but the imbecile and stupid Spanish Government, the friar debased by his vices, and tyrant and oppressor of my people; but nature crushes me, annihilates me! Let it be! I submit to its inscrutable design!”

I should like to see your novel end thus for having sustained, encouraged the Filipino people’s mettle that can still be developed.

But now I understand that you wished to leave to the Filipino people the solution of their social and political problems. Besides, in your magnificent work you have closed the doors, the exit, with your ingenious resort to confusing argumentation, sowing, at the conclusion, anxiety in the hearts, darkness, doubt, and incredulity in the minds, easy of being dissipated, clarified, and comprehended by brains accustomed to think, but impossible of being understood by minds which have just opened to the light, like those of our people. I am afraid that our countrymen over there may not be able to guess right or hit upon the solution of the enigma and they may languish in their despair.

It is desirable, and this is how I feel, that you write another book, solving quickly the problem in order to hasten with it the advent of the beautiful day of our redemption.

Such is my personal and friendly opinion, sincerely expressed, on your new work whose end plunges its readers into despairing skepticism.

As to the book review that I am going to publish in the Spanish press, I will stress the beauties of the book. If I have not yet published it, it is because some countrymen friends, your admirers, advise me to hold over its publication until after a large number of copies of the work has been introduced in Manila. Now, I am awaiting your decision and advice so that I can publish it in La Publicidad. I should like another copy to present to Corominas.

This colony has drafted and signed a congratulatory letter to you.

Let me know in advance your departure for Hong Kong so that I can go to see you at Marseille.

From Madrid I have heard that the Filipinos there do not understand one another. Luna is at the point of revealing against Marcelo.

El Baguio is not yet published, because I am awaiting orders from Hong Kong and Manila.

I am entirely in accord with your ideas expressed in your work.

Regards to Alejandrino and Evangelista.

Always your friend,

GRACIANO

03-658 [Reformists]