But whatever he may have been, or whatever he may have suffered, his claims to be remembered are now centred in his “Guzman de Alfarache.” As it has reached us, it is divided into two parts, the first of which was published at Madrid, in 1599. Its hero, who supposed himself to be the son of a decayed and not very reputable Genoese merchant established at Seville, escapes, as a boy, from his mother, after his father’s ruin and death, and plunges into the world upon adventure. He soon finds himself at Madrid, though not till he has passed through the hands of the officers of justice; and there undergoes all sorts of suffering, serving as a scullion to a cook, and as a ragged errand-boy to whomsoever would employ him; until, seizing a good opportunity, he steals a large sum of money that had been intrusted to him, and escapes to Toledo, where he sets up for a gentleman. But there he becomes, in his turn, the victim of a cunning like his own; and, finding his money nearly gone, enlists for the Italian wars. His star is now on the wane. At Barcelona, he again turns sharper and thief. At Genoa and Rome, he sinks to the lowest conditions of a street beggar. But a cardinal picks him up in the last city and makes him his page; a place in which, but for his bold frauds and tricks, he might long have thriven, and which at last he leaves in great distress, from losses at play, and enters the service of the French ambassador.
Here the first part ends. It was very successful; falling in with the vices and humors of the times, just as the loose court of Philip the Third, and the corrupting influences of his favorite, the Duke of Lerma, came to offer a sort of carnival to folly and vice, after the hypocrisy and constraints of the last dark years of Philip the Second. The Guzman, therefore, within a twelve-month after it appeared, passed through three editions; and, in less than six years, through twenty-six, besides being translated into French and Italian.[94] It was imitated, too, in a second part by some unknown person, probably by Juan Marti, a Valencian advocate, who disguised himself under the name of Mateo Luxan de Sayavedra, and published in 1603 what he boldly called a continuation of the Guzman.[95] But it was a base attempt, which, though not without literary merit, brought upon its author the just reproaches of Aleman, who intimates that his own manuscripts had been improperly used in its composition, and the just sarcasm of Aleman’s friend, Luis de Valdes, who exposed the meanness of the whole fraud.
In 1605, the genuine second part appeared.[96] It begins with the life of Guzman in the house of the French ambassador at Rome, where he serves in some of the most dishonorable employments to which the great of that period degraded their mercenary dependants. But his own follies and crimes drive him away from a place for which he seems to have been in most respects well fitted, and he goes to Siena. At this point in his story, it seems to have occurred to Aleman to attack the Sayavedra who had endeavoured to impose upon the world with a false second part of the Guzman. He therefore introduces a person who is made thus to describe himself:—
“He told me,” says Guzman, who always writes in the style of autobiography, “he told me, that he was an Andalusian, born in Seville, my own native city, Sayavedra by name, with papers to show that he belonged to one of the oldest and most distinguished families among us. Who would suspect fraud under such a fair outside? And yet it was all a lie. He was a Valencian. I do not give his true name, for good reasons; but what with his flowing Castilian, his good looks, and his agreeable manners, it was impossible for me to suspect that he was a thief, a sponge, and a cheat, who had dressed himself up in peacock’s feathers only to obtain by falsehood such an entrance into my apartments that he could rob me of whatever he liked.”[97]
This personage, his history and adventures, fill too large a space in the second part of the Guzman; for when once Aleman had seized him, he seemed not to tire of inflicting punishment so soon as the reader does of witnessing it. Sayavedra robs and cheats Guzman early in this portion of the story; but afterwards accompanies him, in an equivocal capacity, through Milan, Bologna, and Genoa, to Spain, where, partly perhaps to get rid of him, and partly perhaps, as Cervantes did afterwards in the case of Don Quixote and Avellaneda, in order to end his story and prevent his enemy from continuing it any further, Aleman brings his victim’s life to an end.
The remainder of the book is filled with the adventures of Guzman himself, which are as wild and various as possible. He becomes a merchant at Madrid, and cheats his creditors by a fraudulent bankruptcy. He marries, but his wife dies soon; and then he begins, as a student at Alcalá, to prepare himself for the Church;—a consummation of wickedness which is prevented only by his marriage a second time. His second wife, however, leaves him at Seville, where he had established himself, and elopes with a lover to Italy. After this, he is reduced again to abject poverty; and, unable to live with his old, wretched, and shameless mother, he becomes major-domo to a lady of fortune, robs her, and is sent to the galleys, where he has the good luck to reveal a conspiracy and is rewarded with his freedom and a full pardon.
With this announcement the second part abruptly ends, not without promising a third, which was never published, though the author, in his Preface, says it was already written. The work, therefore, as it has come to us, is imperfect. But it was not, on that account, the less favored and admired. On the contrary, it was translated and printed all over Europe, in French, in Italian, in German, in Portuguese, in English, in Dutch, and even in Latin; a rare success, whose secret lies partly in the age when the Guzman appeared, and still more in the power and talent of the author.[98] The long moralizing discourses with which it abounds, written in a pure Castilian style, with much quaintness and point, were then admired, and saved it from censures which it could otherwise hardly have failed to encounter. These are, no doubt, the passages that led Ben Jonson to speak of it as
“The Spanish Proteus, which, though writ
But in one tongue, was formed with the world’s wit,
And hath the noblest mark of a good booke,