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Huizache, July 1, 1900. No grounds for proceeding against any specific person, having resulted from the investigation, these records may be placed in the archives. It is so ordered. Thus decreed the first constitutional Judge, acting in accord with the assisting witnesses.
FEDERICO GAMBOA.
If I must confess the truth, Don Federico Gamboa was not agreeable, as a writer, to me. His book, Del Natural, seemed to me the effort, not always well sustained, of a beginner of promise; his Aparencias, I considered a translated and adapted novel, after the fashion of the dramas and comedies which formerly were “adapted” for the Mexican stage; his Impresiones y Recuerdos, in which the author describes and discusses the time when he smoked his first cigarette, the color of the eyes of his first sweetheart, the ferrule with which his teacher punished his boyish pranks, and other equally interesting matters, made on me the impression of an immense exhibition of personal vanity, in which the writer announced his res et gesta, with the gravity with which a Goncourt or a Daudet might make known what he had done in life.
Thus, then, his new book, Suprema Ley, surprised me agreeably, constituted a revelation,—of a truthfulness so admirable, so vivid, so passional, so full of that well-founded realism, which does not permit a book to remain 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.
If one did not see, at the close of the volume, the dates on which it was begun and concluded, he might believe that it had sprung forth complete, a spontaneous improvisation, a work of the instant, in which neither art, nor trammels of execution, nor imperfections of detail had had a part.
In the novel there is not a needless character, nor a useless incident, nor a single page which does not contribute to the completing of the action and which has not a direct relation to the plot. Even the descriptions, in which our novelists are prodigal to the degree of piling them up indiscriminately, are in Suprema Ley, only different modes in which the subject is impressed by reality. In Gamboa’s work, Belen, the Theatre, the Alameda—especially the Alameda—perform the part of the chorus in Greek tragedy.
The characters are enchantingly real, to the degree that, after reading the book, we feel that we have encountered, seen, and spoken with the actors. Ortegal is a degenerate, whom we all know; Clothilde is a fallen woman with a mask of sanctity, a profligate, who entered the world for man’s undoing; Berón, Holas, even the Comendador and Don Francisco are the very breath of life, are full of enchanting and noble realism.
One given to seek similarity between the old and the new would claim a likeness between Dr. Pascual, the learned man of the Rongón Macquart and the poor court writer, between Clothilde of Zola and the Clothilde of Gamboa, between the first night which the lovers spent united and the first night of Laurent and Therese Raquin, between the servant whose type Gamboa barely sketches and the Juliana Conseira de Eça of Quieros. These similarities may or may not exist, but no charge can be made against Gamboa on account of them; he painted reality and the other novelists painted reality, and nothing resembles itself more closely than truth.