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
