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Rh of religion. And at a time when the prevailing tendency of Christianity was a struggle out of the darkness of Oriental mythology and eschatology into clearness, and an effort towards union with the lucid simplicity of the Hellenic spirit, these Gnostics, for all their efforts, and even the most noble of them, had come too late. They are not the men of a forward movement, but they are, and remain, in spite of all clearer insight, the rear-guard in the history of piety, who have gone under and disappeared in a struggle with the impossible. None the less we cannot omit the observation that the Christian Church in later centuries to a certain extent travelled again over Gnostic ground in its sacra-mental theories and fully developed Christological speculations.

(Author:Wilhelm Bousset)

VALENZUELA, FERNANDO DE (1630–1692), Spanish royal favourite and minister, was born at Naples on the 19th of January 1630. His father, Don Francisco de Valenzuela, a gentleman of Ronda, had been compelled to flee from Spain in consequence of a brawl, and had enlisted as a soldier in Naples, where he married Dona Leonora de Encisa. Francisco de Valenzuela having died young, his son was placed by his mother as a page in the household of the duke of Infantado. He lost his place owing to a reduction of the duke’s establishment, and for several years he lived obscurely; but by good fortune he succeeded in persuading Maria de Uceda, one of the ladiesin-waiting of Mariana, second wife of Philip IV., to marry him. liy her help Valenzuela obtained a footing in the palace. He was appointed introduce of ambassadors on the 12th of October 1671, and it became notorious that whoever had a petition to present or a place to ask for must apply to him. He became popularly known as the duende, the fairy or brownie of the palace, and was believed to be the lover of the queen. In 1675 a court intrigue, conducted by his rivals and supported by the younger Don John of Austria, was so far successful that he was driven from court; but the queen gave him the title of marquis of Villa Sierra, and appointed him ambassador to Venice. Valenzuela succeeded in getting the embassy exchanged for the governorship of Granada. His stay at this post was short, for he was able to organize a counter-intrigue which soon brought him back to court. The queen-regent now openly appointed him prime minister, gave him official quarters in the palace, and conferred a grandee ship on him, to the profound indignation of the other grandees. In January 1678 a palace revolution broke out against the queen-regent, who was driven from Madrid, and Valenzuela fled for refuge to the monastery of the Escorial. He was, however, taken out by force, and his house was pillaged. His property was confiscated-his jewels, furniture and ready money were estimated to amount to £120,000—he was degraded from the grandee ship and exiled to the Philippines. At a later period he was released from close confinement and allowed to settle in Mexico, where a pension was given him. He died in Mexico, from the kick of a horse he was breaking in, on the 7th of February 1692. Part of his property, and the title of Villa Sierra, but not the grandee ship, were restored to his wife and children. The career of Valenzuela probably helped to suggest the subject of Ruy Blas to Victor Hugo.

See Documentos Inéditos para la Historia de España, vol. lxvii. (Madrid, 1842, &c.), which contain an artful and well-written defence of himself addressed to King Charles II. of Spain from Mexico.

VALERA Y ALCALÁ GALIANO, JUAN (1824–1905), Spanish novelist, son of a retired Commodore, Jose Valera, who married Dona Dolores Alcala Galiano, marquesa de la Paniega, widow of a Swiss general named Freuller, was born on the 18th of October 1824 at Cabra (Cordova). Valera' was educated at Malaga and at the university of Granada, where he took a-degree in law. Entering diplomacy in 1847, he became unpaid attaché to the Spanish embassy at Naples under the famous Duke de Rivas, the leader of the romantic movement in Spain. Valera witnessed the events of the Revolution, was promoted second secretary to the embassy at Lisbon in 1850, and in 1851 was transferred as first secretary to Rio de Janeiro, where he remained for two years. After a short'period passed at Dresden, he was appointed to the permanent staff of the Foreign Office at Madrid, and in 1857 was attached to the special embassy to St Petersburg under the Duke de Osuna. In 1858 he resigned his post, was elected deputy for Archidona, in the province of Malaga, took his seat with the advanced Liberal Opposition, and joined with Albareda and Fabié in founding El Contemporáneo, a very influential journal. An expert in the art of covering an opponent with polite ridicule, his writings in the press attracted general attention. He was elected a member of the Spanish Academy in 1861, and remained in Opposition till 1865, when O’Donnell appointed him minister at Frankfort; on the flight of Isabella II. in 1868 he was elected deputy for Montilla in the province of Cordova, became under-secretary of state for foreign affairs, and was one of the deputation who offered the crown to Amadeus of Savoy in the Pitti Palace at Florence. Though he always called himself a Moderate Liberal, Valera invariably voted for what are considered Radical measures in Spain, and a speech delivered by him in February 1863 against the temporal power of the pope created a profound sensation. However, though a member of the revolutionary party, he steadily opposed organic constitutional changes, and therefore he retired from public life during the period of republican government. After the Bourbon restoration he acted as minister at Lisbon (1881–1883), at Washington (1885), at Brussels (1886) and as ambassador at Vienna (1893–1895), retiring from the diplomatic service on the 5th of March 1896. During the last ten years of his life he took no active part in politics. He died on the 18th of April 1905.

Valera's first publication, Canciones, Romances y Poemas, was published in 1856. His verses are melodious, finished and various in subject; but they are rather the imitative exercises of a scholarly man of the world than the inspirations of an original poet. That they failed to attract notice is not altogether to be regretted, for, as Valera himself confessed later in his half ironical, half-ingenuous preface to the second edition (1885), “In spite of my idleness, I should have shown a most deplorable fecundity had I been received with favour and applause.” However, 'if he published little more in the shape of verse, he wrote incessantly in prose. More than two-thirds of his work is still uncollected, buried in reviews and newspapers; but we may take it that he rescued what he thought most valuable. His criticism may be read in the Estudios criticos sobre literature (1864), in the Discrtaciones y juicios literarios (1878) and in the Nuevos estudios criticos (1888); yet, with all his penetration and taste, Valera laboured under one disadvantage not frequent in critics. He suffered from an excessive amiability. He said a hundred incisive, wise, witty, subtle and suggestive things concerning the mysticism of St Theresa, the art of novel writing, Faust, the Inquisition, Don Quixote, Shakespeare, the psychology of love in literature; but, to do himself justice, it was an almost indispensable condition that he should deal with the past. In the presence of a living author Valera was disarmed. Unless the writer were an incurable pessimist, Valera would find something in his work to praise, exhausting the vocabulary of compliment and graceful tribute; but, except in the Cartas americanas (1889), where the laudation was manifestly so exaggerated that no harm could come of it, this trick of eulogy became perplexing and misleading. Valera, in effect, refused to criticize contemporary literature; as a. rival author it seemed to him an indelicacy to censure his competitors, and he was either laudatory or silent. It is regrettable, for criticism was and is greatly needed in Spain.

Valera, then, excelled neither as a poet nor as an impartial critic; he had the vocation of the novelist, though he was slow in discovering it, since he was in his fiftieth year before he published the novel which was to make him famous. Pepita