[In the following essay, Goldberg contends that González Martínez introduced a "new orientation of Modernism" with his emphasis on reason and contemplation of ethe-real beauty.]

[González Martínez] comes at a time when Mexico's need is for stern self-discipline, solid culture and widespread education, rather than for effete æstheticism and ultra refinement. The verses that he wrote as a child were probably of the same character as is produced by most gifted children; his training as a physician, however, with the necessary scientific application to concrete phenomena, must have had not a little to do with his substitution of the owl for the swan. Social need and a scientific discipline aptly merged with a poetic pantheism furnished the background for the physician-poet's new orientation of modernism. …

A host of contradictory influences have played upon the idol of young Mexico's poetry lovers. Lamartine, Poe, Baudelaire, Verlaine (the ubiquitous Verlaine!), Heredia, Francis Jammes, Samain. Yet here we find no morbidity, no dandyism, no ultra-refinement. Where other poets feel the passing nature of joy and cry out, admonishing mortals to "seize the day" ere it fly, González Martínez ("a melancholy optimist" de Icaza has termed him, in a paradoxical phrase that seems to sum up modern optimism) feels rather the transitory character of grief. He is what I may call an intellectual pantheist,—his absorption of nature is not the ingenuous immersion of the primitive soul into the sea of sights and sounds about him; it is the pantheism of a modern intellect that gazes at feeling through the glasses of reason, and having looked, throws the glasses away. … In all things, as he tells us in the beautiful poem "Busca En Todas Las Cosas," from his collection Los Senderos Ocultos, he seeks a soul and a hidden meaning. The modernist poets are prodigal with poems upon their artistic creeds and practises. In this series of melodious quatrains González Martínez enlightens us upon his poetic outlook:

Busca en todas las cosas un alma y un sentido
  Oculto; no te ciñes a la aparencia vana;
  Husmes, sigue el rastro de la verdad arcana
  Escudriñante el ojo y aguzado el oído.

Ama todo lo grácil de la vida, la calma
  De la flor que se mece, el color, el paisaje;
  Ya sabrás poco á poco descifrar su lenguaje. …
Oh, divino coloquio de las cosas y el alma!

hay en todo los seres una blanda sonrisa,
Un dolor inefable ó un misterio sombrío
¿Sabes tu si son lágrimas las gotas de rocío?
Sabes tu que secretos va cantando la brisa?

That is the secret of the poet's charm. His pantheism is as much wonder as worship; as much inquiry as implicit belief. As he has told us in "La Plegaría de la Noche en la Selva": "Now I know it, now I have seen it with my restless eyes, oh infinite mystery of the nocturnal shadows! To my engrossed spirit you have shown the urn in which with jealous care you hoard your deepest secrets." If poets must have heraldic birds, if Poe must have his raven, Darío his swan, Verlaine his hieratic cat, González Martínez has his owl and night is his ambient,—not the Tristissima Nox of a Gutiérrez Nájera, but that night which unto night showeth knowledge.

To Miss Blackwell I am indebted for versions of some characteristic poems by González Martínez. These reveal the poet's mood of communion as well as his peculiarly contemporary pantheism. The first selection is one of the most popular of modern Mexican poems and almost at once found its way into the anthologies:

"Like Brother and Sister"

Like brother with dear sister, hand in hand,
We walk abroad and wander through the land.

The meadow's peace is flooded full tonight
  Of white and radiant moonlight, shining bright.
  So fair night's landscape 'neath the moon's clear
     beam,
  Though it is real, it seems to be a dream.
  Suddenly, from a corner of the way,
  We hear a song. It seems a strange bird's lay,
  Ne'er heard before, with mystic meaning rife,
  Song of another world, another life.
  "Oh, do you hear?" you ask, and fix on me
  Eyes full of questions, dark with mystery.
So deep is night's sweet quiet that enrings them,
  We hear our two hearts beating, quick and free.
  "Fear not!" I answer. "Songs by night there be
  That we may hear, but never know who sings
     them."

Like brother with dear sister, hand in hand,
  We walk abroad and roam across the land.

Kissed by the breeze of night that wanders wide,
  The waters of the neighboring pool delight,
  And bathed within the waves a star has birth,
  A swan its neck outstretches, calm and slow,
  Like a white serpent 'neath the moon's pale glow,
  That from an alabaster egg comes forth.
  While gazing on the water silently,
  You feel as 'twere a flitting butterfly
  Grazing your neck—the thrill of some desire
  That passes like a wave—the sudden fire
  And shiver, the contraction light and fine
  Of a warm kiss, as if it might be mine.
  Lifting to me a face of timid fear
  You murmur, trembling, "Did you kiss me, dear?"
  Your small hand presses mine. Then, murmuring
     low,
  "Ah, know you not?" I whisper in your ear,
  "Who gives those kisses you will never know,
  Nor even if they be real kisses, dear!"

Like brother with dear sister, hand in hand,
We walk abroad and wander through the land.

In giddy faintness, 'mid the mystic night,
  Your face you lean upon my breast, and feel
  A burning teardrop, falling from above,
  In silence o'er your languid forehead steal.
  Your dreamy eyes you fasten on me, sighing,
  And ask me very gently, "Are you crying?"
  "Mine eyes are dry. Look in their depths and see!
  But in the fields when darkness overspreads them,
  Remember there are tears that fall by night,"
  I say, "of which we ne'er shall know who sheds
     them!"

The two poems that follow are a delicate variation of a similar mood; note the attitude of wonder in the first, as well as the sense of repose in both.

"A Hidden Spring"

Within the shadowy bowl of mossy valleys,
  Afar from noise, you come forth timidly,
  Singing a strange and secret melody,
  With silvery dropping, where your clear stream
     sallies.

No wanton fauns in brutal hunting bold
  Have muddied you, or heard your voice that sings;
  You know not even of what far-off springs
  The unseen veins created you of old.

May rural gods preserve your lonely peace!
  Still may the sighing leaves, the sobbing breeze,
  Down the low murmurs of your scanty flow!
  Forgive me that my momentary glance
  Of your unknown existence learned by chance;
  And hence, with noiseless footsteps, let me go!

"To a Stone by the Wayside"

O mossy stone, thou pillow small and hard
  Where my brow rested, 'neath the starlight's
     gleam,
  Where, as my weak flesh slept, my life soared up!
  I give thee thanks for giving me a dream.

The gray grass gleamed like silver fair, bedewed
  By a fresh-fallen shower with many a tear.
  A bird upon the bough his music sighed
  Beneath the twilight, hueless, thin and clear.

Yearning, I followed evening's concert sweet.
  The shining ladder by a star-beam given
  I climbed, with eyes fast closed but heart awake,
And ascended to the heights of heaven.

Like Jacob, there the marvel I beheld.
  That in a dream prophetic glowed and burned.
  In the brief space for which my sleep endured,
  I sailed a sea, and to the shore returned.

O mossy stone, thou pillow small and hard!
  Thou didst receive, beneath the starlight's gleam,
  My aimless longing, my sad weariness;
  I give thee thanks for giving me a dream.

His soul is quiveringly responsive to nature's every mood, which is his own.

Sometimes a leaf that flutters in the air,
  Torn from the treetops by the breezes' strife,
  A weeping of clear waters flowing by,
  A nightingale's rich song, disturb my life.

And soft, sweet languors, ecstasies supreme,
  Timid and far away, come back to me.
  That star and I, we know each other well;
  Brothers to me are yonder flower and tree.

My spirit, entering into griefs abyss,
  Dives to the farthest bottom, without fear.
  To me 'tis like a deep, mysterious book;
  Letter by letter I can read it clear.

A subtle atmosphere, a mournful breeze,
  Make my tears flow in silence, running free,
  And I am like a note of that sad song
  Chanted by all things, whatsoe'er they be.

Delirious fancies in a throng press near—
  Hallucination, or insanity?—
  The lilies' souls to me their kisses give,
  The passing clouds all greet me, floating by.

Divine Communion! for a fleeting space
  My senses waken to a sharpness rare.
  I know what you are murmuring, shining fount!
  I know what you are saying, wandering air!

I loose myself from all things, free myself
  To live a new life—and I should not say
  If I through all things am diffused abroad,
  Or all come into me, and with me stay.

But all things flee me, and my soul takes flight
  On heavy wings, 'mid faint and chilly breezes,
  In an aloofness inconsolable,
  Through solitude which terrifies and freezes.

Therefore, amid my pangs of loneliness,
  The while my senses sleep, I bend mine ear,
  O Nature, to receive thy lightest words—
I tremble at each murmur that I hear.

And that is why a falling, fluttering leaf,
  Torn from the tree tops by the breezes' strife,
  A tear of limpid water flowing by,
A nightingale's rich song, disturb my life.

González Martínez, indeed, is a strange union of the social spirit and the lonely contemplator of the universe. His loneliness is not, however, the seclusion of the hermit fleeing mankind, as of the spirit in advance of his fellows. "Genius," said Martí, "is simply anticipation; it foresees in detail what others do not behold even in outline, and as the rest do not see what the genius sees, it regards him with amazement, wearies of his splendor and persistency and leaves him to feed upon himself, to suffer." Something of this sense of isolation is in González Martinez's "Sower of Stars":

Thou shalt pass by, and men will say, "What
     pathway does he follow,
  Lo, the somnambulist?" But thou, unheeding
     murmurs vain,
  Wilt go thy way, thy linen robe upon the air out-
   floating,
  Thy robe of linen whitened with pride and with
     disdain.

Few, few will bear thee company—souls made of
     dreams and visions;
And when the forest's end is reached, and steeper
     grows the track,
  They will behold the wall of rock that rises huge

  before them,
  And they will say with terror, "Let us wait till he
    comes back."

And all alone thou wilt ascend the high and
    crannied pathways,
  And soon the strange procession of the landscapes
  will file by,
And all alone it shall be thine to part the cloudy
  curtains,
There where the lofty summits kiss the splendors
    of the sky.

Upon some night of moonlight faint, and sad,
    mysterious shadows,
  Thou wilt come downward slowly, descending
    from the height,
  Holding thine hands up, laden full, and, with a
    giver's gesture,
  Sprinkling around thee, one by one, bright roses
    made of light.

And men, absorbed, will gaze upon the brightness
    of thy foot-prints,
  And, many-voiced, that multitude will raise a
    joyful cry:
  "He is a thief of stars!" And then thy generous
     hand forever
  Will keep on scattering through life the stars from
     out the sky.

Is it strange, then, that he should have his moments of temptation to climb up his ivory tower and renounce the world? This is the spirit of "The Castle."

I built my castle on a summit high,
  One of those peaks where eagles love to nest.
  One window I left wide toward life's unrest;
  The sounds, as of the far sea, rise and die.

There I shut up my dreams, beneath the sky—
  Poor wandering caravan that haunts my breast.
  Cloud girt, like some old mountain's hoary crest,
  That far, strange stronghold greets the gazer's eye.

My dreams wait there till I shall close the door.
They will behold me from my home of yore
  Cross the still halls, to be their guest for aye.
  Latching the doors, the bolts I shall let fall,
  And in the moat that girds the castle wall
  Some night shall proudly cast the keys away.

"The thing which hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun." Thus spake the Preacher. But then, was it not Paul in his second epistle to the Corinthians who said that "old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new"? Between the two statements might be placed all the battles that are forever being waged around the newest of the new standards in art. "Newness," after all, is a matter of spirit rather than of chronology. The unimaginative poetaster of today who shrieks his little theories and seeks to exemplify them in chopped lines that are neither literary fish nor flesh, is ancient even as he writes, while the great authors of all time are freshly new because true to something more durable than a love of novelty for novelty's sake. Nothing ages so quickly as novelty. This, however, is no reason for condemning an entire movement, for the new spirit is always right, unless progress is to resolve into classic stagnation. A Rémy de Gourmont may say that "the new is always good because it is new," and a Villergas that "the good is not new and the new is not good"; both, in their excessive adherence to a school rather than to an idea, over-emphasize the point; above all the rivalries of school and precept (often merely verbal) there is a kin-ship among all true poets and creators. That modern view which tends to break away from schools, that inherent unity between the "new" and the "old," is deeply felt and effectively expressed by González Martínez in his sonnet "The Poets, Tomorrow…", wherein he sings the same eternal questioning under different forms.

Tomorrow the poets will sing a divine verse that we of today cannot achieve; new constellations will reveal, with a new trembling, a different destiny to their restless souls. Tomorrow the poets will follow their road, absorbed in a new and strange blossoming, and on hearing our song, will cast to the winds our outworn illusion. And all will be useless, and all will be vain; the task will remain forever—the same secret and the same darkness within the heart. And before the eternal shadow that rises and falls they will pick up from the dust the abandoned lyre and sing with it our selfsame song.

Extremes meet. In such a beautiful sonnet as this is in the original, it seems that the new and the old join in a golden circle. Great art is neither old nor new; it is ageless.