Page:Mexico of the Mexicans.djvu/95

Rh 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, 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.