I. THE AMERICAN PHILIPPINES
Philippine literature in English was made possible when, weeks after the capitulation of Manila in 1898, the U.S Military Government was set up and seven schools in the city were re-opened. General Arthur McArthur considered this necessary for the purpose of promoting the pacification of Islands and dissemination of common culture. English was at first taught merely as at subject because the Spanish system of education then existing in the Philippines was allowed to continue.
In 1900 English became the official medium of instruction in the Philippines. More schools are opened all over the islands. The first teachers were army men, and their wives. In 1901 the Philippine Normal School was founded train Filipino teachers to take charge of elementary education. In the same year the army transport, Thomas, brought six hundred American teachers to the Islands to be incorporated into the educational system of the Occupation. These teachers introduced English and American literature to the Filipinos – writers such as Irving, Bryant, Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Holmes, Whitman, Lowell, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Coleridge, Lamb and a host of other lesser American and English writers. These were the writers who stimulated and became the models of our early writers in English.
The period of 1910 to 1935 is generally called the period of apprenticeship or imitation but on the two words, apprenticeship probably describe the situation better. Virginia Moreno in her “A Critical Study of the Short Story in English Written by Filipinos” describe the years 1910-1925 “as a period of novices with their exercises in fiction-making and rise of the new language.” Pura Santillan-Castrence calls the early writers “pioneers” which, in fact, they were.
The writers noticeably imitated American and English writers. This fact hardly to be wondered at since the early writers were, for the more part college students or professionals whose literally education had been largely confined to American and English authors. These were the works they studied and analyzed and learned to appreciate. To the student of those times, our nature literature was a practically a “foreign” literature. English and American literature dominated their textbooks.
In 1908 the University of the Philippines was founded. It early became the center of literately effort and out of its class rooms emerged our first promising writers in English. On September 1910, the first issue of the U.P Folio came of the press. This publication is recognized as an embodiment of the early attempts of Filipinos at self-expression in English. Dean S. Fansler and Harriet Fansler, both professors at the U.P., were especially interested in the venture and worked hard at training their student to use the English language competently and artistically. They pet themselves squarely behind this literary publication and they exhorted their student to use native material as subject matter for literature. Ramos and Valeros in their Philippine Harvest state “They (Fanslers) inspired their students to look at their own people with pride, unprejudiced eyes; to study their native customs, to applaud their own folk-wisdom, to collect and record basic material as a store for future historians, anthologists and writers. They cautioned then not to ape discriminately the English and American writers that they were studying, and counseled them to right of their people truthfully and well.”
Leopoldo Yabes considers it significant that of the eighteen literary pieces published in the first number of the Folio, thirteen were essays, three were short stories and two were poems. He considered this surprising since, as a general rule, “experiments on language begin with poetry rather than prose . . . the young man first writes down what he thinks; he tries to express his emotions in song before he tries to express them in prose.”
Pura Santillan-Castrence has this to say of the fiction of the period of Apprenticeship “the contributions to the U.P Folio were mostly ghost stories or folk tales explaining natural phenomena. There was no was special writing technique pre-occupation which was later to disturb writers.”
The early writers discovered by the Fanslers are now hardly read. Some were: Vicente Hilario, Godofredo Rivera, Francisco Africa, as teachers, were to influence young writers. For the most part, they cultivated the essay form. Of them, Celso Carunungan states: “the merit of their articles lay in their sobriety, substance and structure – true marks of the scholar, for such was each writer.”
The U.P Folio was replaced by the Philippine Collegian. Others publications, which introduced Philippine literature in English to the public, were: The Philippine Review, the Independent, Rising Philippines, and Citizens.
The years between 1915 and 1925 saw a new group of writers who produce a fairly large harvest of poems, stories and essays. The more outstanding of these were: Fernando Maramag, Jose M. Hernandez, Francisco Tonogbanua, Carlos P. Romulo, Jorge Bocobo, Maximo Kalaw, Mauro Mendez, and Vidal Tan.
In 1921, the American Folkrole society published Filipino Popular Tales, edited by Dean Fansler. The collection included the work of Fansler’s students probably classroom assignments. Fansler states in his introduction that most of these narratives were written about 1914.
In 1920 the Philippine Herald the first Filipino daily in English was founded. It paid for accepted literary works and thus gave an impetus to Filipino writer in English especially in the short story. Jose Garcia Villa in the preface to his Philippine Short Stories states: “The aim, apart from self interest, wasto develop a school of Filipino short story writers or authors, partly as filling a want in the local literary field and partly with a view to the possible to development of some literary genius who might make a name for himself in the United States.”
Ramos and Valero have this to say in evaluating the works produced during the age of Apprenticeship “A careful examination of the creative effort by the Filipino writers during this period will show a lack of artistic discipline; where also too blindly imitative American and English writers . . . the writings was florid, unindiomac and tedious. The writers were too busy learning the fundamentals of the new language to pay attention to the technique and the finer points of writing.”
Leopoldo Yabes commenting in this period says: “In their youthful enthusiasm they most often lost their intellectual and emotional restraint . . . and the result was the production of the works that reeks with mawkish sentimentalism.” I.V. Mallari, in his Brief Survey of Filipino Literature says that the poems written during this period “were merely exercises.” He calls the poet’s “pioneers, great in their pioneering spirit, great pioneers, but not great poets.” He further adds that the playwrights “should be considered as amateurs who dabbled in the art of purely for the fun of it.”
Pura Santillan-Castrence, speaking of the same writers, says: “Spanish literary qualities still clung to them such as Spanish floridness of expression, the flowery phrases . . .”
When we considered that the Filipinos had just began to matter the English language, our nearly literary output in English can be considered definitely commendable. It can be favorably compared to the Colonial Period of American Literature in relation to English literature of those times. It was no easy matter for these early writers to master the English language. The structure of English is very different from the linguistic structure of Filipino and the wealth of English idioms makes it most difficult for a beginners to manipulate the new language competently. Furthermore, the final evaluation of the literary output of this age cannot be judged entirely by present sophisticated standards since it was written by and for a people who were still steeped in romanticism and were nurtured by American and English literary works belonging to the 19th century rather than the 20th century.
Literature has always depended on some form of literary patronage. In former times the poet had a patron who took care of his daily needs and provided him with an appreciative audience who inspired him to greater efforts and higher attainments. On the warmth and appreciation displayed by patron and audience, the creative artist bloomed and his native capabilities could soar to higher imaginative flights. The writer’s greatest problem has always been how to reach his audience, his countrymen and the world as a whole. The most powerful patron of literature at present is the publisher and the printer. A writer might, of course, publish his own works, but this entails an expense of thousands of pesos most writers are proverbially poor. However, periodicals and journals can and to provide space where aspiring budding writers can display their work.
The period of apprenticeship was inaugurated by two significant events. In 1925 A.V.G Harte drop became the editor of the Philippine Education Magazine. This soon became the most influential literary magazine in the Philippine. The Manila Tribune was established in the same year. It began publishing a Sunday Supplement featuring short stories and poems written in English. Other journals followed suit and there was a market although still very limited, for Filipino literary output in English. The publication which accepted literary contributions in English were: the Graphic. The Woman’s Outlooks and the Woman’s Homes Journal. The University of the Philippines continued publishing the Collegian. Other schools, both public and private, published their own papers and magazines where students could submit their literary efforts. But the University of the Philippines was still the center of literary activity.
In 1926 Jose Garcia Villa began to turn out a stream of short stories and poems. In 1927 the U.P Writer’s club was founded and began publishing the Literary Apprentice which became the most prestigious college literary publication in the country. Again, as had happened before, three American professors at U.P. namely, George P. Shanon, T. Inglish Moore and Harold P. Scott played a substantial role in the development of Philippine literature in English. According to Jose M. Hernandez, “these men were responsible for the introduction of a new tone and spirit in Philippine letters. A strong wave of liberal ideas took possession of the writers’ Imagination and within a short period the writers were dabbling, not only in ancient classical studies but in modern forms of expression such as free verse, symbolism and expressionism.”
The year 1927 was another land mark in Filipino literature in English. The Bureau of Education published Philippine Prose and Poetry which was adopted as a textbook. Villa, always in the vanguard of literary activity, introduced Walt Whitman to the Philippines with the publication of his un-conventional “Man Songs”. This brought in a cycle of experimentation and rapid development. Filipino writers began to cultivate different literary forms and technique; many of them revolted against older literary conventions.
The literature output was further stimulated by literary contest. The first of this contest was the one offered by the free press in the field of the short story. The short story has always been a favorite form in the Philippines; it is the form which has expressed more truly the temper and the nature of the people.
In 1927 the Free Press published the first anthology of Philippine short stories written in English. The publication of this book was favorably received at home and abroad. The stories showed that the Filipino could express himself capably in English and catch the correct nuances of the language at the same time that he could project Filipino ideologies. According to Yabes, ‘’. . . in 1930 it (Philippine Literature in English had entered upon its period of productivity
The short stories produced during this period were either romantic tales of the past with legendary figures or were imitations of plots and themes taken from American and other foreign sources.
The most significant short story produced during this period was “Dead Stars” by Paz Marquez Benitez. It was published in the Philippine He- rald on September 20, 1925. Her fellow writers immediately recognized the story far. From 1925 to 1930, Filipino short story writers in English experimented on various literary forms and techniques, a fact which revealed their awareness of conscious creation
Poetry was dominated by naïve sentimental love lyrics written in a loose rhetoric without much intellectual significance and overblown to achieve intensity. Verbal exuberance made the poems bombastic, artificial, and insincere. ‘’Sursum Surda’’ is the first known Philippine poem in English; it appeared in the Philippine Free Press in 1907. As has been mentioned, later developments led to imitation of western models and gradually the writers became technically more competent using the English language with growing ease and grace.
Filipino Poetry (1924) edited by Rodolfo Dato and the first anthology of poems in English, illustrates these poetic tendencies, the courageous “venture into the difficult art of reflecting the Filipino soul through poetry.”
The first notable collection of Philippine essays in English, Thinking for Ourselves, compiled and edited by Vicente M. Hilario and Eliseo M. Quirino, appeared in 1924. The selection dealth with Philippine tradition and history, religion, philosophy, ethics, literature, and the arts, politics and government and other more or less significant matters bearing in the Philippine culture.
The essay took a form similar to the utilized by British and American writers, but because the essay is a freer form of composition, it soon developed its own personality. Dear Devices, a book of familiar essays, published in 1933, demonstrated a variety of a subject matter and individual style; it also show the originality, and freshness hardly discernible in Western models. The Philippine essay in English is less inhibited by requirements inherent in other literary genres. It matof ure earlier in the favorable milieu of social, economic, and political developments. It successfully projected Philippine customs and traditions.
The plays produced during this period were mostly highly emotional, not intellectual experiences. Some were openly contrived melodramas or broad comedy. Jorge Bocobo’s “The Radiant Symbol” (1925), Carlos P. Romulo’s “Daughters for Sale” (1924), Vidal’s Tan’s “The husband of Mrs.Cruz,” and Hilario P. Vibal’s “The Waves” could only enjoy campus presentations and could not complete with the popularity of the zarzuela.
American influence in the drama was less discernible, although contact with American drama was rather extensive and foreign plays were stage in Manila now and then. The drama had difficulty in reconciling Filipino experiences and realities with organic artistic expression.
“As far as language is concerned, it might also be pointed out that the Filipino play right in English has to contend with his basic weakness in his medium.
In 1900 English became the official medium of instruction in the Philippines. More schools are opened all over the islands. The first teachers were army men, and their wives. In 1901 the Philippine Normal School was founded train Filipino teachers to take charge of elementary education. In the same year the army transport, Thomas, brought six hundred American teachers to the Islands to be incorporated into the educational system of the Occupation. These teachers introduced English and American literature to the Filipinos – writers such as Irving, Bryant, Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Holmes, Whitman, Lowell, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Coleridge, Lamb and a host of other lesser American and English writers. These were the writers who stimulated and became the models of our early writers in English.
The period of 1910 to 1935 is generally called the period of apprenticeship or imitation but on the two words, apprenticeship probably describe the situation better. Virginia Moreno in her “A Critical Study of the Short Story in English Written by Filipinos” describe the years 1910-1925 “as a period of novices with their exercises in fiction-making and rise of the new language.” Pura Santillan-Castrence calls the early writers “pioneers” which, in fact, they were.
The writers noticeably imitated American and English writers. This fact hardly to be wondered at since the early writers were, for the more part college students or professionals whose literally education had been largely confined to American and English authors. These were the works they studied and analyzed and learned to appreciate. To the student of those times, our nature literature was a practically a “foreign” literature. English and American literature dominated their textbooks.
In 1908 the University of the Philippines was founded. It early became the center of literately effort and out of its class rooms emerged our first promising writers in English. On September 1910, the first issue of the U.P Folio came of the press. This publication is recognized as an embodiment of the early attempts of Filipinos at self-expression in English. Dean S. Fansler and Harriet Fansler, both professors at the U.P., were especially interested in the venture and worked hard at training their student to use the English language competently and artistically. They pet themselves squarely behind this literary publication and they exhorted their student to use native material as subject matter for literature. Ramos and Valeros in their Philippine Harvest state “They (Fanslers) inspired their students to look at their own people with pride, unprejudiced eyes; to study their native customs, to applaud their own folk-wisdom, to collect and record basic material as a store for future historians, anthologists and writers. They cautioned then not to ape discriminately the English and American writers that they were studying, and counseled them to right of their people truthfully and well.”
Leopoldo Yabes considers it significant that of the eighteen literary pieces published in the first number of the Folio, thirteen were essays, three were short stories and two were poems. He considered this surprising since, as a general rule, “experiments on language begin with poetry rather than prose . . . the young man first writes down what he thinks; he tries to express his emotions in song before he tries to express them in prose.”
Pura Santillan-Castrence has this to say of the fiction of the period of Apprenticeship “the contributions to the U.P Folio were mostly ghost stories or folk tales explaining natural phenomena. There was no was special writing technique pre-occupation which was later to disturb writers.”
The early writers discovered by the Fanslers are now hardly read. Some were: Vicente Hilario, Godofredo Rivera, Francisco Africa, as teachers, were to influence young writers. For the most part, they cultivated the essay form. Of them, Celso Carunungan states: “the merit of their articles lay in their sobriety, substance and structure – true marks of the scholar, for such was each writer.”
The U.P Folio was replaced by the Philippine Collegian. Others publications, which introduced Philippine literature in English to the public, were: The Philippine Review, the Independent, Rising Philippines, and Citizens.
The years between 1915 and 1925 saw a new group of writers who produce a fairly large harvest of poems, stories and essays. The more outstanding of these were: Fernando Maramag, Jose M. Hernandez, Francisco Tonogbanua, Carlos P. Romulo, Jorge Bocobo, Maximo Kalaw, Mauro Mendez, and Vidal Tan.
In 1921, the American Folkrole society published Filipino Popular Tales, edited by Dean Fansler. The collection included the work of Fansler’s students probably classroom assignments. Fansler states in his introduction that most of these narratives were written about 1914.
In 1920 the Philippine Herald the first Filipino daily in English was founded. It paid for accepted literary works and thus gave an impetus to Filipino writer in English especially in the short story. Jose Garcia Villa in the preface to his Philippine Short Stories states: “The aim, apart from self interest, wasto develop a school of Filipino short story writers or authors, partly as filling a want in the local literary field and partly with a view to the possible to development of some literary genius who might make a name for himself in the United States.”
Ramos and Valero have this to say in evaluating the works produced during the age of Apprenticeship “A careful examination of the creative effort by the Filipino writers during this period will show a lack of artistic discipline; where also too blindly imitative American and English writers . . . the writings was florid, unindiomac and tedious. The writers were too busy learning the fundamentals of the new language to pay attention to the technique and the finer points of writing.”
Leopoldo Yabes commenting in this period says: “In their youthful enthusiasm they most often lost their intellectual and emotional restraint . . . and the result was the production of the works that reeks with mawkish sentimentalism.” I.V. Mallari, in his Brief Survey of Filipino Literature says that the poems written during this period “were merely exercises.” He calls the poet’s “pioneers, great in their pioneering spirit, great pioneers, but not great poets.” He further adds that the playwrights “should be considered as amateurs who dabbled in the art of purely for the fun of it.”
Pura Santillan-Castrence, speaking of the same writers, says: “Spanish literary qualities still clung to them such as Spanish floridness of expression, the flowery phrases . . .”
When we considered that the Filipinos had just began to matter the English language, our nearly literary output in English can be considered definitely commendable. It can be favorably compared to the Colonial Period of American Literature in relation to English literature of those times. It was no easy matter for these early writers to master the English language. The structure of English is very different from the linguistic structure of Filipino and the wealth of English idioms makes it most difficult for a beginners to manipulate the new language competently. Furthermore, the final evaluation of the literary output of this age cannot be judged entirely by present sophisticated standards since it was written by and for a people who were still steeped in romanticism and were nurtured by American and English literary works belonging to the 19th century rather than the 20th century.
Literature has always depended on some form of literary patronage. In former times the poet had a patron who took care of his daily needs and provided him with an appreciative audience who inspired him to greater efforts and higher attainments. On the warmth and appreciation displayed by patron and audience, the creative artist bloomed and his native capabilities could soar to higher imaginative flights. The writer’s greatest problem has always been how to reach his audience, his countrymen and the world as a whole. The most powerful patron of literature at present is the publisher and the printer. A writer might, of course, publish his own works, but this entails an expense of thousands of pesos most writers are proverbially poor. However, periodicals and journals can and to provide space where aspiring budding writers can display their work.
The period of apprenticeship was inaugurated by two significant events. In 1925 A.V.G Harte drop became the editor of the Philippine Education Magazine. This soon became the most influential literary magazine in the Philippine. The Manila Tribune was established in the same year. It began publishing a Sunday Supplement featuring short stories and poems written in English. Other journals followed suit and there was a market although still very limited, for Filipino literary output in English. The publication which accepted literary contributions in English were: the Graphic. The Woman’s Outlooks and the Woman’s Homes Journal. The University of the Philippines continued publishing the Collegian. Other schools, both public and private, published their own papers and magazines where students could submit their literary efforts. But the University of the Philippines was still the center of literary activity.
In 1926 Jose Garcia Villa began to turn out a stream of short stories and poems. In 1927 the U.P Writer’s club was founded and began publishing the Literary Apprentice which became the most prestigious college literary publication in the country. Again, as had happened before, three American professors at U.P. namely, George P. Shanon, T. Inglish Moore and Harold P. Scott played a substantial role in the development of Philippine literature in English. According to Jose M. Hernandez, “these men were responsible for the introduction of a new tone and spirit in Philippine letters. A strong wave of liberal ideas took possession of the writers’ Imagination and within a short period the writers were dabbling, not only in ancient classical studies but in modern forms of expression such as free verse, symbolism and expressionism.”
The year 1927 was another land mark in Filipino literature in English. The Bureau of Education published Philippine Prose and Poetry which was adopted as a textbook. Villa, always in the vanguard of literary activity, introduced Walt Whitman to the Philippines with the publication of his un-conventional “Man Songs”. This brought in a cycle of experimentation and rapid development. Filipino writers began to cultivate different literary forms and technique; many of them revolted against older literary conventions.
The literature output was further stimulated by literary contest. The first of this contest was the one offered by the free press in the field of the short story. The short story has always been a favorite form in the Philippines; it is the form which has expressed more truly the temper and the nature of the people.
In 1927 the Free Press published the first anthology of Philippine short stories written in English. The publication of this book was favorably received at home and abroad. The stories showed that the Filipino could express himself capably in English and catch the correct nuances of the language at the same time that he could project Filipino ideologies. According to Yabes, ‘’. . . in 1930 it (Philippine Literature in English had entered upon its period of productivity
The short stories produced during this period were either romantic tales of the past with legendary figures or were imitations of plots and themes taken from American and other foreign sources.
The most significant short story produced during this period was “Dead Stars” by Paz Marquez Benitez. It was published in the Philippine He- rald on September 20, 1925. Her fellow writers immediately recognized the story far. From 1925 to 1930, Filipino short story writers in English experimented on various literary forms and techniques, a fact which revealed their awareness of conscious creation
Poetry was dominated by naïve sentimental love lyrics written in a loose rhetoric without much intellectual significance and overblown to achieve intensity. Verbal exuberance made the poems bombastic, artificial, and insincere. ‘’Sursum Surda’’ is the first known Philippine poem in English; it appeared in the Philippine Free Press in 1907. As has been mentioned, later developments led to imitation of western models and gradually the writers became technically more competent using the English language with growing ease and grace.
Filipino Poetry (1924) edited by Rodolfo Dato and the first anthology of poems in English, illustrates these poetic tendencies, the courageous “venture into the difficult art of reflecting the Filipino soul through poetry.”
The first notable collection of Philippine essays in English, Thinking for Ourselves, compiled and edited by Vicente M. Hilario and Eliseo M. Quirino, appeared in 1924. The selection dealth with Philippine tradition and history, religion, philosophy, ethics, literature, and the arts, politics and government and other more or less significant matters bearing in the Philippine culture.
The essay took a form similar to the utilized by British and American writers, but because the essay is a freer form of composition, it soon developed its own personality. Dear Devices, a book of familiar essays, published in 1933, demonstrated a variety of a subject matter and individual style; it also show the originality, and freshness hardly discernible in Western models. The Philippine essay in English is less inhibited by requirements inherent in other literary genres. It matof ure earlier in the favorable milieu of social, economic, and political developments. It successfully projected Philippine customs and traditions.
The plays produced during this period were mostly highly emotional, not intellectual experiences. Some were openly contrived melodramas or broad comedy. Jorge Bocobo’s “The Radiant Symbol” (1925), Carlos P. Romulo’s “Daughters for Sale” (1924), Vidal’s Tan’s “The husband of Mrs.Cruz,” and Hilario P. Vibal’s “The Waves” could only enjoy campus presentations and could not complete with the popularity of the zarzuela.
American influence in the drama was less discernible, although contact with American drama was rather extensive and foreign plays were stage in Manila now and then. The drama had difficulty in reconciling Filipino experiences and realities with organic artistic expression.
“As far as language is concerned, it might also be pointed out that the Filipino play right in English has to contend with his basic weakness in his medium.