Mexico of the Mexicans/Chapter V

by Lewis Spence

CHAPTER V

LITERATURE AND THE PRESS

In Mexico, as throughout Latin-America, literature is much more generally cultivated than it is among a commercial people like ourselves. The imaginative and poetical genius of the Spaniard has been inherited by the modern Mexican in full measure. British opinion is apt to regard the literary Spaniard as amateurish, and as revelling in the grandiose and "highfalutin," but seldom takes the trouble to view the condition of English letters from the Spanish point of view. English and French littérateurs have evolved a style which, if it possesses the virtues of precision, economy, and neatness, is yet woefully lacking in spirit, in fluency, music, and beauty. In England, it is a literary crime to "let one-self go" in print. Eloquence is frankly disliked in our land. But because we cannot or will not appreciate or understand an excellence that practically all the rest of the world approves, is there any reason why we should so openly contemn the work of others in a sphere which we have closed to ourselves?

The literary Latin-American, and in especial the Mexican of the better type, is usually a precision of the most uncompromising character, insisting upon the employment of the purest Castilian with all the rigour of the hereditary purist—for the Mexicans have always been purists in style. But, that notwithstanding, he does not desire to cramp or limit himself by closing the ears of his spirit to the promptings of inspiration. In Mexican literature we observe none of those carefully toned down passages, those repressed rhapsodies which lend to the works of our stylists such necessary "comic relief"—those flights upon a close-bitted and blinded Pegasus, which remind one of the efforts of an awkward reciter who is too shy to exhibit his powers to the best advantage.

There is, then, no literary shyness in Mexican letters none of the stylistic hypocrisy to which we have become accustomed in English literature. The Mexican is not afraid to let himself go; and if it be charged against him as a misdemeanour that he possesses no sense of discretion in this respect, he is quite within his rights in retorting that such discipline as has proved suitable to the cold English and the systematising French is totally unfitted to the expression of his outlook and his ideals.

No sketch of Mexican literature can altogether ignore the wondrous writings of the Colonial time, which figure again and again in modern Mexican literary productions, and have inspired the younger generation of writers with the knowledge that those who have gone before have bequeathed to them works of which any country might be proud. For the literature of Mexico goes back to the Conquest.

And, first, the book of Sahagun, the Franciscan, contemporary with the Conquest. His Historia Universal de Nueva-España, commenced after 1530, was printed separately by both Bustamante and Lord Kingsborough in 1830. Its historical and mythological value is difficult to overestimate. It was written after years of deep consultation with the wisest of native scribes; banned and confiscated by the blind zeal of his order; scattered throughout the orthodox libraries of moribund monasteries; sent to Madrid, there to become the prey of the official penchant for mañana; unearthed at last by Muñoz, at Tolosi, in Navarre, in some crumbling convent library; and seized upon with avidity by the zealot Kingsborough. Sahagun's translation of the Scriptures is a monument of the possibilities which underlie a barbarous tongue; the rude Mexican or Nahuatl speech is seized, heated to a glow; hammered, welded, and shaped into a shining, sinuous, sword-like thing, despite the cumbrous machinery of the language. It is a "world-book."

Torquemada, a later Provincial of the same order, did not fail to use Sahagun's manuscript in the composition of his Monarchia Indiana, first printed at Seville in 1615. He is chiefly remarkable, in fact, for his piracy of the old friar's researches. His parallels—Scriptural and profane—range the Greek and the Jew by the side of the feathered Aztec with an anachronistic genius only to be expected of the seventeenth century. His book was again impressed at Madrid in 1723, in three volumes folio. Torquemada's facilities for the acquirement of much that is curious in Mexican antiquity were undoubted; and he has all the charm and amusing garrulity of his age and caste. He is by no means unimportant, were it only for an elementary yet potent curiosity which puts him on the scent of facts the fate of which, under other scrutiny, might have been to remain unrecorded.

Suave and august, the Abbe Clavigero has nought in common with Torquemada. Although a Spanish-speaking brother, his Storia Antica del Messico is written in Italian, and is best known to English readers by the translation of 1807 in two volumes quarto. This work brought the Abbe into fierce controversy with Robertson of Edinburgh, and De Pauw, a French savant, in which the Scottish professor was no less sententious or scathing than the Spanish priest.

The confessional of Joan Baptista, shriver of the Order of San Francisco, was printed in 1559. Old Baptista was the teacher of Torquemada, and professed philosophy and theology at the College-Monastery of Tlatilulco. In his Menologio, Vetancurt styles him "the Mexican Cicero." He was the author of a bundle of quaint manuscripts, which he entitled Teption amoxtli, or "The Little Book." Bartholome de Alua also compiled a confessional in Nahuatl. Bartholome was a native of Mexico and a descendant of those kings of Tezcuco who were the allies of Montezuma, and whose dynasty perished with his amidst the smoke of the Spaniards' "death-thunder."

Alonso de Molina's Confessional (1578) is one of the most difficult to procure of those works which were impressed in Mexico. It is extremely curious and quaint, and written in both Mexican and Castilian. Molina was born in the year of the Columbian discovery, and was also the author of a Vocabulario. This Vocabulario, by the way, was the first dictionary printed in the New World, and is cited by Thomas in his History of Printing in America as a great literary curiosity. For a long time it was generally supposed that this was the first book printed in the New World.

The first printing press which found its way to Mexico was actually brought thither at the request of Archbishop Zumarraga, the wholesale destroyer of the native Aztec manuscripts so much bewailed by scholars. Thus "out of the eater came forth meat." Ever since then the printing press has been busy in Mexico.

Modern journals are numerous. The Mexican Herald, an admirably conducted paper, is published in English, and caters to the English-speaking people in the Republic. It is housed in a most palatial building and exerts enormous influence, representing as it does the capital and enterprise of the country. Among other English papers, the evening Daily Record —the only English evening paper in Mexico—has a high reputation.

The native Press has a splendid record of educative and enlightening labour behind it. Only some twenty years ago, people of the peon class who were able to read were the exception, but to-day even The Native
Press. the most ragged of them evidenlty finds the daily paper a necessary adjunct to his well-being. The Press is in no wise "muzzled" in Mexico, and its influence with the general public is supreme. El Imparcial, the great Mexican daily, has a circulation approaching 100,000 copies; and its evening journal, El Mundo, is also widely patronised. El Popular, with its afternoon edition El Argos, is extremely "popular," as its name suggests, with the masses. La Patria is frankly anti-American, and the pen of its editor is not infrequently dipped in gall. The Financiero Mexicana deals with commercial affairs and the money market in an able manner. Religious sheets are popular and plentiful. El Pais (The Country) and El Tiempo (The Times) are both ably conducted and widely read. La Tribuna is a strong Catholic bi-weekly, with highly Conservative tendencies which appeal to many of the older generation.

As has happened in other countries, Mexican journalism has been powerfully affected by the spirit of the times. The once dignified and rather sombre productions which glided rather than fell from the printing-presses of Mexico city have given way to newspapers which in tone reflect the "new" American spirit of journalism, its "human" note, its rather gross personalities, its meretricious smartness, its tendency towards the flippant and frivolous. Added to this we find a tendency towards the exaggerated in language which has nothing in common with the gift of ardent utterance we have before alluded to as despised by British writers. That gift is the property of distinguished writers alone. But the Latin-American and Mexican journalist deems it essential to copy this exalted style, and, as he does not in most cases possess the great powers necessary to the fulfilment of such a task, he produces false rhetoric and mistakes the use of superlatives for eloquence. In his totally undisciplined efforts such phrases as "magnificent," "immortal," "fabulous," and the like abound; whilst he can praise no public man without the employment of such adjectives as "illustrious" and "distinguished." The reiteration of such phrases is irritating and monotonous, but perhaps not more so than to read in our own newspapers that "It appears" that such and such an event occurred, or that "Alderman Jones is temporarily laid aside with a distressing attack of sciatica." The cliché is as rife among ourselves as elsewhere.

In spite of this tendency towards flippancy and fulsomeness in the lower ranks of Mexican journalism, the opinionative matter in the leading dailies of the capital is, in general, of a fairly high literary stamp, the language is well chosen, and considerable graces of style are often displayed in the composition of even a political leading article. But one is told that the Mexican journalist's style is in process of falling off, and that the efforts of the new school do not approach those of their predecessors in purity and elegance.

Of weekly journals, there is a supply sufficient for the needs of the community. El Mundo Illustrado, owned by the proprietors of El Imparcial, is well illustrated, bright, and informative, as is its rival El Mundo. Artes y Letres is a publication devoted to the connoisseur in the Arts and Literature; and its criticisms on books, pictures, and allied matters carry considerable weight. El Semanario Literario and La Revista Literaria are, as their names imply, literary reviews, both conducted with good taste and judgment. The comic Press is by no means of high grade, and dealing, as it does, chiefly in personalities, is offensive to most persons of refinement, however great its appeal to the vulgar and irreverent.

The haute littérature of Mexico, as has been said, is represented by a circle of purists who evince great anxiety as to the future of Mexican letters. Chief among these, Agüeros. perhaps, or at least typical of them, was the late Senor Agüeros. Of the high Conservative school of politics, a writer of accurate and polished Spanish, a journalist whose work was marked by thought and judgment, but who was by no means well disposed towards all that is liberal and modern, Victoriano Agüeros's most valuable work was undoubtedly that to which he had addressed himself of later years —the rehabilitation of Mexican authors in the sight of the Mexican people. Observing the neglect into which the national literature was falling and deploring the popular taste for the meretricious type of French fiction, Señor Agüeros set himself to counter-act this lamentable vogue by the publication, in uniform style, of the works of the best Mexican authors under the general title of "Biblioteca de Autores Mexicanos" (Library of Mexican Authors). More than fifty volumes are now collected under this series, which has been well received.

Born in 1884 in Tlalchapa, in the State of Guerrero, Señor Agüeros had a long literary career. He left law for letters, as so many Mexican authors have done, and edited the journal El Imparcial. Later he founded El Tiempo, an ultra-Conservative journal. Among his best known books are Escritores Mexicanos Contemporaneos (Contemporary Mexican Writers) and Confidencias y Recuerdos (Confidences and Recollections).

Señor Agüeros, as has been said, was excessively severe in his criticism of the modern Mexican school. In one of his essays he says of its members: "In my opinion the new generation of writers has no significance. I discern no writers in it, no love for erudition, no noble tendencies such as would foster the advance of our literature…. They believe that they are well informed because they have culled jokes from low dramas, have studied history in novels and opera librettos, and gallantries in fashionable periodicals. They conceive themselves littérateurs and poets because they have published some article in the——and have in the——printed some verses describing their disenchantments, their ennui, their doubts, their hours of pain. Miserable though beardless, their lamentations for their disillusions are boundless … to be singular is what they most desire." Señor Agüeros proceeds to castigate the Mexican jeunesse dorée of letters by saying that they do not study or acquire new information, that they are unmindful of the literary movement of the epoch, and do not follow the masters of their art.

"And if they do none of these things, it is useless for them to write and publish verses, since the progress of a literature has never yet consisted in the abundance of authors and of works. Love of study and for work, close thought, good selection of themes and care in expression these are the things necessary. Criticism also is completely lacking among us."

Señor Agüeros, of course, railed against a dilettante movement which has spread from France and Spain throughout the whole of Latin-America, and is not confined to Mexico alone. Such young men as he describes are met with in every European country, so that his fears for the national literature were scarcely well founded. But it is true that the Mexican youth is prone to extravagance (or what the Englishman would regard as extravagance) in literary as in amatory affairs. His ancestry and environment render it difficult for him to be otherwise. In later life, however, he sobers down; his precocity is disciplined by experience; and in his turn he lectures the gilded youth of a later generation upon the heinous-character of literary make-believe.

Another writer who pleads for a Mexican literature and the treatment of purely Mexican themes is Victoriano Salado Albarez, who has set his face uncompromisingly Albarez. against the weak imitations of French decadent writings. In his De mi cosecha (From My Harvest) he attacks Mexican literary decadence, and pleads for a sane and sound national literature. He has gathered together anecdotes of the national history from the time of Santa Anna to that of the modern reforms in his Santa Anna a la Reforma, and this is perhaps his most notable literary endeavour. La Intervencion y el Imperio (The Intervention and the Empire) treats the time of Maximilian in the same manner. The first part of this work is entitled " The Frogs Begging for a King," from which Senor Albarez's attitude towards his countrymen's behaviour during the Maximilian period can readily be construed.

Luis Gonzalez Obregon, one of Mexico's most charming writers, is best known by his Mexico Viejo (Old Mexico), a delightful collection of two series of essays Obregon. on isolated episodes in ancient Mexican history, legends, old customs, and biographical matter, nearly all of which are drawn from unpublished manuscripts or scarce and precious works. Obregon revels in the obscure and the curious as represented in the history of his native land. He is the authority upon its more recondite history, those small but toothsome rarities of long-forgotten fact which so tickle the palate of the real antiquary. Of such, his "Old Mexico" is a never-failing mine. It has established a reputation beyond the confines of Mexico and has been republished in Paris. No less valuable in its own way is his Novelistas Mexicanos en el Siglo XIX (Mexican Novelists in the Nineteenth Century), in which he has outlined the character of the Mexican novel and attempted to give each fictioneer his place in the national literature. His biographical essays upon Lizardi, a Mexican writer of the early nineteenth century, and Jose Fernando Ramirez are highly appreciated and valued in literary circles in the Republic. Senor Obregon's health has never been strong, but his habits, always those of a valetudenarian, have by no means interfered with his literary labours.

Foremost among Mexican writers on ancient Mexican history was the late Alfredo Chavero, whose knowledge of the affairs of his native land in prehistoric times was rivalled by none, Mexican or European.Chavero
and the
"Antiguedades." Especially was he erudite in the subject of the ancient picture-writings; and the explanatory text of a great work, Antigüedades Mexicanos, published by the commission delegated to fitly celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America, is from his pen. He also edited the Historia Chichimeca and Relaciones of Ixtlilxochitl, a native chronicler, illuminating the text with valuable annotations and making many dark places light. The first volume of Mexico a traves de los Siglos (Mexico Through the Centuries), a vast work in five volumes, each dealing with a distinct epoch in Mexican history and written by an expert, is his, and treats pre-historic Mexico in masterly fashion. He paid close attention to the very important question of the ancient Mexican calendar—the rock on which many archaeologists are wrecked, and a subject of extreme difficulty and most involved character, his principal work on this vexed question being Los dioses astronomicos de los antiguos Mexicanos (The Astronomical Gods of the Ancient Mexicans). Excellent lives of several Mexican worthies of distinction must also be placed to his credit, the most outstanding of which are those of Sahagun (a missionary priest of the Colonial period, who wrote a valuable treatise on the native religion) and Montecuhzoma, the ill-fated Aztec monarch.

But archaeology and history were not Señor Chavero's sole literary interests. He was a playwright, and although his dramas deal with the ancient native life of Mexico, some of them have been well received. Quetzalcoatl, which takes its title from the ancient solar deity of old Mexico, and Xochitl, picture native life in the stirring days of the Conquest. Although he was good-naturedly rallied upon his antiquarian dramatic tastes, it is generally admitted by native critics that his plays breathe a strong patriotic spirit, and are nobly conceived and powerfully if simply executed. It is pointed out, however, by Riva Palacio in his Los Ceros that "our society, our nation, has no love for its traditions"; and that on the strength of native themes alone, "no one gains a reputation here in Mexico." The fantastic taste for the mediaeval in the native novel is blamed for this neglect of native subjects, and preference for the environment of Rhine castles and Spanish court is rightly and sarcastically alluded to.

Chavero was more than an author. He was in younger days a man of affairs, a shrewd lawyer, and was one of Juarez's right-hand men during the period of French intervention. Born in 1841, he commenced the practice of law at the age of 20, and became a member of the House of Deputies in 1862. When the Empire fell in 1867, he abandoned politics for literature, but on the collapse of Lerdo's government was sent to the Department of Foreign Affairs as second in command. He also acted as City Treasurer and Governor of the Federal District, besides fulfilling his duties as a deputy. He died quietly during the dark days of the Revolution.

Primo Feliciano Velasquez, Mexican Academician, historian and journalist, drifted from law into newspaper work. He founded an anti-Government paper, El Estandarte Velasquez. (The Standard) in 1885, and so fierce were its attacks upon constituted authority, that he could not hope to escape the heavy hand of the power he combatted, and pains and penalties followed his bitter criticisms. Turning his attention to the milder muse of ancient history, Velasquez, in his Discovery and Conquest of San Luis Potosi, won the recognition of the Royal Spanish Academy. These researches he followed up by publishing, in 1897 and 1899, the four volumes of his Collection of Documents for the History of San Luis Potosi. In later life, Señor Velasquez has returned to the practice of the law, his first profession.

Ignacio M. Altamirano was one of those men of native Aztec blood who, by dint of genuine ability and personal force, acquired social and literary success. Altamirano. A peon boy, and seemingly doomed to peonage, he helped his parents in the fields at Tixtla, in the State of Guerrero. But poor and despised as is the Indian stock, it bears within it the germ of aesthetic appreciation, and the love of beauty was too deeply implanted in young Altamirano to permit of his remaining in the sordid environment of an Indian village.

The Indian lad who would attain to eminence in any department of Mexican life is doubly handicapped, for not only has he to combat the most soul-destroying poverty, but he must also face a deep-rooted race-prejudice. Born in 1834, Altamirano's abilities were recognised in the village school, and he was sent to the Literary Institute at Toluca, and later to the Colegio de san Juan at Mexico. His real literary energies commenced with the Revolution of 1854, which impelled him to write politically on the Liberal side.

Especially intense was his address against the Law of Amnesty. A close follower of Juarez, he did splendid journalistic service during the re-establishment of the Republic. His life until 1889 was passed as a publicist and man of letters, and in the latter year he was sent to Spain as Consul-General of the Republic there. But his health broke down, and he was transferred to the more temperate climate of France as Consul-General at Paris. Like all men of his race, he grieved greatly at his separation from his native land, and it is thought that this hastened his end, which took place at San Remo in February, 1893.

Altamirano was, perhaps, the most remarkable aboriginal Mexican littérateur of modern times. From his pen flowed biographies, novels, verse, criticism, and political and literary essays in the most astonishing profusion. He pleaded for the development and formation of a national, a purely characteristic Mexican literary style, even as Björnson pleaded for a purely Norse literary language. "We want," he says in one of his essays, "that there should be created a literature wholly our own, such as all peoples possess, . . . we run the risk of being credited as we are painted (by foreigners), unless we ourselves take the brush and say to the world— 'Thus we are in Mexico.' "

The writings of Altamirano, like those of many another worthy journalist-author, were scattered throughout countless periodicals. But they were recently collected and published. Perhaps his most characteristic book is Paisajes and Leyendas (Landscapes and Legends), published in 1884.

Physiologist, logician, and man-of-letters, the late Porfirio Parra, who died quite recently, was one of the most various men in Mexico. He abandoned a chair of Porfirio
Parra. Logic to accept that of Physiology in the National School of Medicine, and he held the chairs of Mathematics and Zootechnology in the National Agricultural and Veterinary School. Born in the Northern State of Chihuahua, he early exhibited signs of great promise, and was not quite 14 years of age when his State voted him the requisite funds to enable him to pursue his studies in Mexico city. In 1902 he became Secretary of the Upper Council of Education. On several occasions he represented Mexico in European Medical Congresses. His accomplishments seemed boundless, for he also wrote scientific poetry (Odes to a Skull, to Mathematics, to Medicine, and on the Death of Pasteur), A New System of Logic; a novel, Pacitillas; and countless essays are also from his pen. His only venture in fiction is an interesting picture of Mexican life, and concerns the doings of four fellow-students at the School of Medicine.

Perhaps the foremost writer on the ancient history of Yucatan is Juan F. Molina Solis, who belongs to an old Spanish-Yucatec family, and who was born Molina. in the realm of the ancient Maya in 1850. His History of the Discovery and Conquest of Yucatan is a standard authority, acknowledging original sources only and patiently discriminating between those which are of real value and those which lean towards the marvellous. In journalism, Señor Molina represents the ultra- Conservative standpoint so typical of the Society of isolated Yucatan; but his leading articles are scrupulously fair to his opponents, if their tone is candid, and his patriotism is undoubted.

Modern Mexican fiction tends for the most part towards the realist school. Its note is scarcely one of optimism Mexican
Fiction. any more than is the note of Mexican verse. Indeed, it has been called squalid and sordid. Its most famous protagonists are Frederico Gamboa and the late Rafael Delgado.

Frederico Gamboa has covered a wide field of literature. Just over 50 years of age, he, like nearly all his literary colleagues in Mexico, was educated for the Gamboa. legal profession, but he succeeded in entering the Corps Diplomatique, and was dispatched to Guatemala as one of the Secretaries of the Mexican Legation there, afterwards filling posts in Argentina, Brazil, and elsewhere with acceptance; and later being appointed Secretary to the Embassy at Washington in 1902. Earlier in life, he practised journalism and translated the words of rather ephemeral operettas for the stage. But by far his best work in letters have been fictional. His Suprema Ley (The Supreme Law), Metamorfosis, and Santa are realistic, and recall the work of Hardy and Zola. The theme of Suprema Ley is the love of a married man, a poor clerk, with five children, for a fascinating woman socially above him; his disillusion; his return to his wife; his repentance; and death from consumption, the last in the true style of Björnson. "The marital affection is choked by the ivy of disgust and the weeds of custom; the home disappears, covered by the weeds which grow and grow until they cover even the pinnacle of the exterior." Carmen, the neglected wife, is a pathetic figure. She resolves to regain her husband's affection by "the charms of a chaste coquetry." "But on regarding her attractions, impaired by child-bearing; her features rendered sharper by time; the hands she was so proud of in girlhood, roughened by cooking and washing, she felt two tears burn her eyes; and, unable to excel in a combat of graces, she lowered her face on the table, supported by her arms, in silent sorrow for her vanished youth and her perished beauty."

In Suprema Ley, Gamboa has struck a universal chord. Such a story is no more Mexican than it is British, Italian, Russian. Indeed, there is a spirit of greatness in the book, which is, perhaps, one of the best conceived Mexican novels of modern times. Its faults are the faults of all modern Latin literature. The love interest is not all which the story contains, but it is all in all, or at least intended to be all in all while we peruse it. The amatory passages are prolonged, and the erotic psychology is intense, minutely described, and is capable of endless ramifications. But the grand simplicity of plan redeems all. Moreover, we learn more of Mexican life in such a work than from the absurd pseudo-Parisian novels which metamorphose Mexicans into Frenchmen with all the vices of the Gaul and none of his virtues. Says Victoriano Albarez regarding this novel: "Suprema Ley surprised me agreeably, came as a revelation—of admirable truthfulness, vivid, passionate, full of well-founded realism of the kind which will not keep a book on the shelf of the bookseller, but places it upon the table of the reader and in the memory of the lover of the beautiful. . . There is not a needless character nor a useless incident, nor one page which does not contribute to the completion of the action and which has not a direct relation to the plot. . . . Gamboa . . . is, before all and beyond all, an analyst, a dissector of souls who sees to the bottom of hearts. . . Lamartine and Daudet might well have drawn the picture if Lamartine and Daudet had dedicated themselves to painting Mexican types of the humbler class. There is no doubt that the world of Gamboa is, as that of Carlyle, a heap of fetid filth, shadowed by a leaden sky, where only groans and cries of despair are heard; but, as in the terrible imagination of the British thinker, flashes of kindliness, bringing counsel and resignation, cleave the sky of this Gehenna."

Another Mexican realist was Rafael Delgado, whose novels La Calandria, Angelina, and Los Parientes Ricos (Rich Relations), deal with the lower classes of Mexico. Rafael
Delgado. Daudet and the brothers Goncourt set their seal upon him, but he was no mere imitator. Describing his methods of work, he says: "Plot does not enter much into my plan. It is true that it gives interest to a novel, but it usually distracts the mind from the truth. For me, the novel is history, and thus does not invariably possess the machinery and arrangement of the spectacular drama. In my judgment, it ought to be the artistic copy of the truth—like history, a fine art. I have desired that Los Parientes Ricos should be something of that sort—an exact page from Mexican life."

But his chief d'œuvre is, perhaps, Calandria. In the beginning we find Guadalope, a woman of ill-repute, on her death-bed. Carmen, nicknamed "the Calandria" because of her singing, is her illegitimate daughter by Don Eduardo, and is left destitute. Don Eduardo undertakes to support her in the house in which her mother died, and she is looked after by an old woman, Dona Pancha, who had been kind to her mother. Pancha's son, Gabriel, a young cabinet-maker of good character, falls in love with Carmen, and she with him. But a loose woman, Magdalena, exercises a bad influence upon the young singer, and brings her into touch with a vicious young aristocrat named Rosas. Gabriel is annoyed, and a breach is opened between the lovers, and finally Gabriel casts off La Calandria, who, in despair, falls into the arms of Rosas, who seduces her under promise of marriage and, later, abandons her. From that time she rapidly sinks into a life of infamy, and eventually commits suicide.

Delgado has also written much lyric poetry, essays, and dramas in prose and verse, and has translated Octave Feuillet's A Case of Conscience.

Mexican verse writers are legion, but it cannot truthfully be said that any of them has reached distinction. They prefer to sing, as Agüeros truthfully remarked, Mexican
Verse. of their "disenchantments" rather than of life, of which their verses have no savour. The poetry that does not mirror life and its realities is scarcely likely to survive, and the Mexican verse writers would do well to follow the lead of Gamboa and Delgado and regard things as they are—not as they seem.