The Fourth Estate, vol. 1

COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY BRENTANO'S
The Fourth Estate



THE early writings of this distinguished native of Asturias partake of a peculiar interest, strongly appealing to one's human sympathies. On his thirtieth birthday Señor Valdés married a young lady scarcely more than half his age. She was very frail, and after eighteen months of tenderly devoted love on both sides, the husband was left alone with an infant son. The charming and pathetic little tale The Idyl of an Invalid describes the earlier portion of the author's brief wedded life, and in fact was written during that happy period. The year after his wife's death he published Riverita, in which novel his late partner was made to appear as a child, and in the sequel to Riverita, Maximina, published still a year later, we find her depicted as ripening to womanhood. Thus, out of Valdés's early novels three bear this melancholy yet attractive personal quality.
His beginning in the field of fiction, Armando Palacio Valdés made in 1881, with Young Mr. Octavio, following it up, in 1883, with Martha and Mary. Then, between The Idyl of an Invalid and Riverita came José. The novel here offered, a specimen of his work combining pathos with humor, was printed the year after Maximina, that is to say, in 1888.
When The Fourth Estate was brought out Valdés was thirty-five. He was born on the 4th of October, 1853, in a little village called Entralgo, where his family owned a summer villa. The greater part of the year they spent at Avilés, at which place young Armando first went to school. He continued his studies at Oviedo, and then went to Madrid, with the object of graduating as a lawyer.
His real bent, that of authorship, however, soon declared itself, so that while yet occupied with his legal studies he contributed articles on philosophical and theological subjects to the Spanish Revista Europea —of which periodical he eventually joined the staff and became the editor. In this capacity he earned a national reputation as a censor of literature, his articles and sketches pertaining to literary criticism being collected in several volumes. But after 1881 he devoted little time to commenting on other people's books, preferring to bend his main energies to creative endeavor.