Page:Mexico of the Mexicans.djvu/93

 Rh 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