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. [69] 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. 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. [70]