Once and again in Mexico there arises, from the mass of the Indian population, a man who leads, not only his race, but his nation. Such a man was the great President Juarez, who established Mexico’s present greatness; such in art were the artist Cabrera and the sculptor Instolinque; such in letters was Ignacio M. Altamirano.

No one who knows not the Mexican Indian village can appreciate the heroism of the man who, born of Indian parents, in such surroundings, attains to eminence in the nation. It is true that the Aztec mind is keen, quick, receptive; true that the poorest Indian of that tribe delights in things of beauty; true that the proverb and pithy saying in their language show a philosophic perception. But after all this is admitted the horizon of the Indian village is narrow: there are few motives to inspiration; life is hard and monotonous. It must indeed be a divine spark that drives an Aztec village boy to rise above his surroundings, to gain wide outlook, to achieve notable things.

And when once started on his career, what an enormous gulf yawns behind him! How absolutely severed henceforth from his own. And what a gulf opens before him! He is absolutely alone. Poor, friendless, with race prejudice against him, obstacles undreamed of by the ordinary man of talent confront him. Only immense ambition, tenacious purpose, inflexible persistence, unconquerable will, can succeed.

Ignacio M. Altamirano, pure Aztec Indian, was born at Tixtla, State of Guerrero, December 12, 1834. The first fourteen years of his life were the same as those of every Indian boy in Mexico; he learned the Christian Doctrine and helped his parents in the field. Entering the village school he excelled and was sent, at public expense, in 1849, to Toluca to study at the Instituto Literario. From that time on his life was mainly literary—devoted to learning, to instructing, and to writing. From Toluca he went to the City of Mexico, where he entered the Colegio de San Juan Letran. In 1854 he participated in the Revolution. From that date his political writings were important. Ever a Liberal of the Liberals, he figured in the stirring events of the War of the Reform, and in 1861 was in Congress. When aroused he was a speaker of power; his address against the Law of Amnesty was terrific. Partner with Juarez in the difficulties under Maximilian, he was also partner in the glory of the re-established Republic. From then as journalist, teacher, encourager of public education and man of letters his life passed usefully until 1889, when he was sent as Consul-General of the Republic to Spain. His health failing there, he was transferred to the corresponding appointment at Paris. He died February 13, 1893, at San Remo. His illness was chiefly nostalgia, longing for that Mexico he loved so much and served so well.

Altamirano was honored and loved by men of letters of both political parties. Although a pronounced Liberal, he numbered friends and admirers among the Conservatives. His honesty, independence, strength, and marvelous gentleness bound his friends firmly to him. He loved the young and ever encouraged those rising authors who form today the literary body of Mexico.

We may not even enumerate his writings. He produced graceful poems, strong novels, realistic descriptions, delicate but trenchant criticism, strong discourses, truthful biographies. He ever urged the development of a national, a characteristic literature, and pleaded for the utilization of national material. Unfortunately, his writings are scattered through periodicals difficult of access. A collection of them is now being made. Our selections are taken from his Revista Literaria (Literary Review) of 1861, from a discussion of Poetry dated 1870, and from his well-known Paisajes y Leyendas (Landscapes and Legends) of 1884.

GENIUS AND OBSTACLES.

Rigorously speaking, it can not be said that popular neglect can be a chain which holds genius in the dust of impotence.

No: the genius, powerful and lofty eagle, knows how to break with his talons the vulgar bonds with which the pettiness of the world may attempt to shackle thought.

Thus Homer, aged beggar, to whose eyes the sun denied its light, but whose divine soul inspiration illuminated, was able to endow ungrateful Greece, in return for his miserable bread, with the majesty of Olympus, with the glory of the heroes and with the immortality of those eternal songs which survive the decay of the agonies and the ruin of empires.

Thus, Dante, proscribed by his countrymen, has been able to cause to spring from the depths of his hatred and his grief the omnipotent ray which was to illuminate the conscience of his time and to be the admiration of future ages.

Thus, that other blind man, who, as Byron says, made the name Miltonic synonym of sublime and who died as he had lived the sworn enemy of tyrants, in the cell to which ingratitude consigned him, improvised for himself a throne, and from its dominated creation saw prostrate themselves at his feet not only his country, but the world.

Thus Cervantes, the poor cripple, disdained by persons of distinction and persecuted by fortune created, in the midst of the agony of misery, the sole treasure which can not be wrested from old Spain, more precious truly than the ephemeral grandeur of kings and the imbecile pride of nobles.

Thus lastly, Camoens, soldier also like Cervantes, and like him unfortunate, left in his deathbed in a foreign hospital, as a great legacy to his country, his Lusiadas, the most beautiful monument of Portuguese glory.

Thus many others, dead through the hemlock of contemporary disdain, and compensated with tardy apotheosis, have not found obstacles in poverty, in envy and in defeat; and abandoning with thought the narrow spheres of the world, have gone to grave their names upon the heaven of poetry.

But such is the privilege of genius and of genius only. The talents which cannot aspire to such height, nor feel themselves endowed with force divine, are eclipsed in the test, the same test which causes him, who is predestined for sublimity, to shine forth more resplendent and more grand.

And in Mexico the genius enwraps himself yet in the shades of the invisible, or does not belong to the new generation.

Those of us who penetrate, with timidity and difficulty, into the sacred enclosure of poetry and literature, belong to the crowd of mortals; and scarcely may we aspire to the character of second rate workers in the family of those who think.

Thus for us are heavy those chains which for geniuses would be but spider webs; discouragement crushes us at times—discouragement, that poisoned draught, whose vase of vile clay is shattered before the glance of genius, accustomed to sip the nectar of the immortals in the myrrhine cup of faith.

As for us, we need, not the applauses of the world, but the sympathy of our countrymen, the word of encouragement, the hand which saves us from the waves which threaten to submerge us in their bosom.

It is not the necessities of material life which hamper us. We may rise superior to those or may supply them with the product of honorable labor, though outside of literature. As little do we seek, the patronage of the mighty. The gilded mean of Horace were unbearable for us if we have to supply in exchange for it a Hymn to Maecenas; the palatial advantages of Virgil would cause us loathing if we had to purchase them by placing the sacred lyre of the aged singer of the Gods at the feet of Augustus.

PLEA FOR A MEXICAN SCHOOL OF WRITING.

We do not deny the great utility of studying all the literary schools of the civilized world; we would be incapable of such nonsense, we who adore the classical memories of Greece and of Rome, we who ponder long over the books of Dante and Shakespeare, who admire the German school and who should desire to be worthy to speak the language of Cervantes and of Fray Luis de Leon. No: on the contrary, we believe these studies indispensable: but we desire that there be created a literature absolutely our own, such as all nations possess, nations which also study the monuments of others, but do not take pride in servilely imitating them.

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Our last war has attracted to us the eyes of the civilized world. It desires to know this singular nation, which contains so many and such coveted riches, which could not be reduced by European forces, which living in the midst of constant agitations has lost neither its vigor nor its faith. It desires to know our history, our public customs, our private lives, our virtues and our vices; and to that end it devours whatever ignorant and prejudiced foreigners relate in Europe, disguising their lies under the seductive dress of the legend and impressions of travel. We run the risk of being believed such as we are painted, unless we ourselves seize the brush and say to the world—Thus are we in Mexico.

Until now those nations have seen nothing more than the very antiquated pages of Thomas Gage or the studies of Baron Humboldt, very good, certainly but which could only be made upon a nation still enslaved. Further, the famous savant gave more attention to his scientific investigations than to his character portraits.

Since his day, almost all travelers have calumniated us, from Lovestern and Madam Calderon, to the writers—male and female—of the court of Maximilian, trading upon public curiosity, selling it their satires against us.

There is occasion, then, to make of fine letters an arm of defense. There is a field, there are niches, there is time, it is necessary that there shall be the will. There are talents in our land which can compete with those which shine in the old world.

THE PROCESSION OF THE CHRISTS.

If there is one thing characteristic in the Holy Week at Tixtla, it is this procession of the Christs, ancient, venerated, and difficult to abolish. It responds to a necessity of the organization of the Tixtla Indians, strongly fetichistic, perhaps because of their priestly origin. This propensity has caused the maintenance always in the pueblo of a large family of indigenous sculptors who live by the fabrication of images—poor things!—without having the least idea of drawing, nor of color, nor of proportion, nor of sentiment. For them sculpture is still the same rudimentary and ideographic art that existed before the conquest. Thus with a trunk of bamboo, with the pith of a calchual, or of any other soft and spongy tree, they improvise a body which resembles that of a man, give it a coat of water-glue and plaster and paint it afterwards in most vivid colors, literally bathing it in blood. Á mal cristo, mucho sangre (bad Christ, much blood); such is the proverb which my artistic compatriots realize in an admirable fashion. After they varnish the image with a coat of oil of fir, they have it blessed by the priest and then adore it in the domestic teocalli, on whose altar it is set up among the other penates of similar fabrication.

The only day on which such Christs sally forth to public view is Holy Thursday and in reality few family festivals assume a more intimate character than the especial festival with which each native family celebrates the sallying forth of its Christ. A padrino (godfather) is selected who shall take it out, that is to say who shall carry it in the procession, on a platform if it is large, in his hand if it is little. But every Christ has an attendance which bears candles and incense.

With such a cortege, the Christs gather in the portico of the church, awaiting the priest and the Christ who shall lead the procession, the one which is called the Christ of the Indians. When these issue from the church the procession is organized; the cross and the great candlesticks go before and then file by slowly and in good order some eight hundred or a thousand Christs with their retinues. Tixtla has some eight thousand inhabitants, hence there is a Christ to about each eight persons. This might well dismay an iconoclast.

The procession passes through the more important streets, in the midst of the crowd gathered at the corners, the doors, windows and public squares. What a variety of images! It should be stated that not all represent crucifixes; there are also Christs with the cross on their shoulders, some simply stand, others of ‘Ecce-homos of the pillar,’ but these are few; the crucifixes are in majority. The sole respect in which all are equal is in the rude sculptural execution. There are some in which the chest muscles rise an inch above the ribs, others which have the neck of the size of the legs; some are the living portrait of Gwinplaine or of Quasimodo; they smile lugubriously or they wink the half closed eyes with a grimace calculated to produce epilepsy. All have natural hair arrangement, the hair arrangement of the Indians, disordered, blown by the wind, tangled like a mass of serpents around the bleeding body of the Christ.

As to size they vary from the colossal Altepecristo,[17] which the Indians hide in caverns, which is almost an idol of the old mythology, to the microscopic Christ which wee Indians of nine years carry with their thumb and forefinger, before which are burned tapers as slender as cigarettes. All the sizes, all the colors, all the meagerness of form, all the wounds, all the deformities, all the humped-backs, all the dislocations, all the absurdities which can be perpetrated in sculpture, are represented in this procession. When by the light of torches (for this procession ends at night), this immense line of suspended, behaired and bloody bodies is seen in movement, one might believe himself oppressed by a frightful nightmare or imagine himself traversing some forest of the middle ages in which a tribe of naked gypsies had been hung.

Callot in his wild imagination never saw a procession more fantastic, more original.

Yet this spectacle was the delight of my boyhood days!

Then the Christs withdrew with their padrinos and retinues to the houses whence they issued and there the family prepared a savory feast. The atole of cornmeal called champol and the sweet and delicate totopos.

Ah, General Riva Palacio, never in thy days of campaign in Michoacan, have you had a more sumptuous banquet than that which you have enjoyed in the land of your fathers, an evening of the Christs—and of champol!