Page:Mexico of the Mexicans.djvu/94

78 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. 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."