VALERA Y ALCALÁ GALIANO, JUAN. — Spanish writer and diplomat, b. at Cabra on 18 October 1824, d. at Madrid on 18 April 1905.
He was the nephew of the Duque de Rivas and his companion at the embassy in Naples. Political activity and a passion for knowledge made him an attentive traveler in many countries of Europe and America and an expert on contemporary literary fashions, which he, an aristocratic and conservative spirit endowed with a broad Greek and Latin culture, tempered with classical composure.
His uneven, but always carefully controlled, lyric, dramatic, essayistic, and narrative production reaches its culmination in the novel Pepita Jiménez (1874), a partially epistolary representation, often indebted to the language of the Spanish mystics, of the inner collapse of a young man, a candidate for the priesthood but without a true vocation, who, after a struggle whose stages the author skillfully reconstructs, yields to the call of earthly love. “The enchantments of the nervous, agile, and mischievous style” of the “intellectual sybarite” that V. was cannot save the development of the novel’s plot from a certain conventionalism; moreover, in it “the ideas of the ancient Spanish mystics appear entirely distorted in the attempt to make them clash with the modern sense of life” (M. de Montoliu). Other narrative works: Las ilusiones del doctor Faustino, El comendador Mendoza, Doña Luz, Juanita la larga. His studies of Don Quijote, Faust, Shakespeare, the Inquisition, and s. Teresa are interesting. In Meta-fisica a la ligera, V., who also ventured into the field of thought without, however, attaining clearly defined positions, hindered by his skepticism, attempts to rise from the concept of a confused “absolute” to the idea of God, which cannot be attained through rational process but is reflected in the spirit of man, who “through this reflection divines God, although he cannot conceive Him except by analogy with his own soul, transferred onto the plane of the magnificent.” V. lived his final years in a dignity resignedly endured. His work as a refined stylist and a detached evoker of reality was never popular.