VALERA y ALCALÁ GALIANO, JUAN. - Spanish writer and diplomat, b. at Cabra on 18 Oct. 1824, d. at Madrid on 18 Apr. 1905.
He was the nephew of the Duque de Rivas and his companion at the embassy in Naples. Political activity and a thirst for knowledge made him an attentive traveller in many countries of Europe and America, and an expert in contemporary literary trends, which he, an aristocratic and conservative spirit with a vast knowledge of Greek and Latin, tempered with classical composure.
His uneven but always controlled output in lyric, drama, essays and narrative culminates in the novel Pepita Jiménez (1874), a partially epistolary work often indebted to the language of Spanish mystics, depicting the inner turmoil of a young man, destined for but lacking true vocation to the priesthood, who, after a struggle skilfully reconstructed by the author in its phases, yields to the call of earthly love. «The charms of a nervous, agile and mischievous style» of the «intellectual epicurean» that V. was do not suffice to redeem the plot’s conventionalism, in which moreover «the ideas of the old Spanish mystics are entirely blurred 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. Of interest are his studies on Don Quijote, on Faust, on Shakespeare, on the Inquisition, on St Teresa. In Metafisica a la ligera, V., who also essayed in the field of thought without, however, reaching well-defined positions—hindered by his scepticism—attempts to rise from the concept of a confused «absolute» to the idea of God, unattainable by rational process but reflected in the spirit of man, who «by this reflection divines God, though unable to conceive Him save by analogy with his own soul, transferred to the plane of the magnificent». V. spent his last years in blindness resignedly borne. His work as a refined stylist and detached evoker of reality was never popular.