Portuguese literature
Ausentes_ (i. e. trustee for the property of dead or absent Portuguese)
at Macao. Whether his satiric verses had anything to do with the
appointment we do not know--some have maintained that the Portuguese
of Goa appreciated his poetical powers best at a distance--but it is
more probable that his appointment was a favour, since every post in
India was eagerly coveted, and it was a kinder action to give him a
comparatively humble one at once than the reversion to a more lucrative
office, filled thrice or even ten times over by the deplorable system
of ‘successions’.[410] He set sail in the spring of 1556, and after
touching at Malacca, arrived at the Molucca Islands, the most lawless
region in India. Camões himself, according to Storck, was wounded
about this time, but in a fight at sea, not in one of the chronic
broils at Ternate or Tidore. In 1557 or 1558 he reached Macao, but
two years later he was relieved of his post owing to a quarrel with
the settlers, whose part was taken by the captain of the silver and
silk ship passing from Goa to China. On his authority Camões was sent
to Goa, protesting against _o injusto mando_, which was a common fate
of officials in India. He was shipwrecked off the coast of Tongking,
lost all his possessions, and arrived penniless and perhaps in
debt at Goa in 1560 or 1561. To these four or five chequered years
are ascribed the wonderful _quintilhas_, the most beautiful in the
language, _Sobolos rios que vam_, which may owe something to Vicente’s
admirable paraphrase of Psalm l, the _canção Com força desusada_, the
_oitavas Como nos vossos_, and the completion of the first six books
of the _Lusiads_. Soon after his return he was probably imprisoned
for debt, but was released, probably at the instance of the Viceroy,
D. Francisco Coutinho, Conde de Redondo, to whom Camões addressed his
first printed poem, the ode in Orta’s _Coloquios_ (1563). Camões’
thoughts must have now more than ever turned homeward. Fortune had
danced tantalizingly before him, holding out hopes which broke as
glass in his hands whenever he attempted to seize them.[411] Of his
life between 1564 and 1567 we know nothing. He did not occupy the
post of factor of Chaul, the reversion to which indeed he may perhaps
only have received after his return to Portugal. He was eager to get
home. In 1567 he accompanied Pedro Barreto to Mozambique, glad to get
even so far on the return voyage. There poverty and illness delayed
him till 1569, when through the generosity and in the company of some
friends, among whom was the historian Couto, he was able to embark for
Portugal. They reached Lisbon in April, 1570.[412] Sixteen years had
passed. The popular, impulsive, talented youth returned middle-aged,
poverty-stricken, and unknown. Antonio de Noronha and many others of
his friends were dead. Catherina de Athaide had died in 1556 (although
she may have continued to receive Camões’ rapt devotion as the dead
Beatrice that of Dante), Prince João, hope and patron of poets, two
years earlier. The plague, to which nearly half the city’s population
had succumbed, had only recently abated, and Camões may have witnessed
the thanksgiving procession in Lisbon on April 20, 1570. Modern critics
have even denied him the only consolation which probably remained to
him in the _patria esquiva a quem se mal aproveitou_[413], but there
seems no reason to reject the tradition that his mother was alive; in
fact she survived him and continued to receive the pension of 15,000
_réis_[414] granted him from 1572 till his death on Friday, June 10,
1580. It was a sum barely sufficient to support life, and it was not
always regularly paid, so that he is reported to have been in the
habit of saying that he would prefer to his pension a whip for the
responsible officials (_almoxarifes_). Tradition, to the indignation of
reasonable historians, loves to represent a faithful Javanese slave,
who had accompanied Camões to Europe, begging for his master in the
streets of Lisbon. Camões did not go with King Sebastian to Africa.
He may have been already ill when the expedition set out in June
1578--the plague soon began again to ravage Lisbon, and long years
of suffering and disappointment must have sapped his strength. Two
years later his life of heroic endurance, in patience of the _juizos
incognitos de Deos_,[415] ended. He was perhaps buried in a common
grave with other victims of the plague.[416] Long absence had served
to strengthen his love for his _patria ditosa amada_, and the news
from Africa left him no heart to battle against disease, content, as
he wrote to the Captain-General of Lamego, to die with his country,
with which his name has ever since been intimately linked. Couto and
Mariz agree that he brought _Os Lusiadas_ with him virtually complete
on his return to Portugal. It was published through the influence of
the poet D. Manuel de Portugal in 1572. Camões has often been called
the prince of heroic poets, but it is noteworthy that Faria e Sousa
in 1685 says that ‘all have hitherto, especially in Spain, considered
him greater as a lyric than as an heroic poet’.[417] _Os Lusiadas_
rather than an epic is a great lyrical hymn in praise of Portugal,
with splendid episodes such as the descriptions of the death of
Inés, the battle of Aljubarrota, the storm, Adamastor, the Island of
Venus. Apart from the style, its originality consists in the skill
with which in a poem but half the length of Tasso’s _Gerusalemme
Liberata_ and a fifth of Ariosto’s _Orlando Furioso_ the poet works
in the entire history of his country. It is this which gives unity
to his ten cantos of _oitavas_, this and the wonderfully transparent
flow of the verse, which carries the reader over many weaknesses and
inequalities of detail. It is a nobler poem than the crowded garden
of flowers in a high wind that is the _Orlando Furioso_, and at once
more human and intense than the _Gerusalemme Liberata_. Camões, with a
wonderful memory and intimate knowledge of the legends of Greece and
Rome, read everything, and we find him gathering his material from
all sides[418] like a bird in spring, from a Latin treatise of the
antiquarian Resende, from the historians Duarte Galvão, Pina, Lopez,
Barros, or Castanheda, or literally translating lines of Virgil, as
in his shorter poems he imitated Petrarca, Garci Lasso, and Boscán.
Tasso used the _mot juste_ when in a sonnet addressed to Camões he
called him _dotto e buon Luigi_.[419] If, as seems probable, he had
early wished to sing the deeds of the Portuguese, the first volumes of
Castanheda and Barros must have been an incentive as powerful as the
destiny which made him personally acquainted with the scenes of Gama’s
voyage and of the Portuguese victories in the East. It seems probable
that cantos iii and iv, containing the early history of Portugal,
were already written, and that around them he wove the epic grandeur
revealed in the histories of the discovery of India. The poem opens
with an invocation to the nymphs of the Tagus and to King Sebastian,
and then, in a wonderful stanza of the sea (_Já no largo oceano
navegavam_, i. 19), Gama’s ships are shown in mid-voyage. The gods of
Olympus take sides, and Venus protects the daring adventurers in seas
never crossed before, while Mars stirs up the natives of Mozambique
and of Mombaça to treachery (i-ii). In contrast to the natives farther
south, the King of Melinde receives them with loyal friendship, and
Gama rewards him by relating the history of Portugal (iii-iv). He then
continues his voyage, and after weathering a terrible storm brewed by
Bacchus, arrives at Calicut (v-vi). After a visit to the Samori (the
King of Calicut), the Catual (the Governor) accompanies Gama on board,
and Paulo da Gama explains to him the warlike deeds of the Portuguese
embroidered on the silken banners of the ships (vii-viii). On the
return voyage they are entertained by Tethys and her nymphs in the
island of Venus, supposed to be one of the Azores (ix-x), and the poem
ends with a second invocation to King Sebastian (x. 145-56). Thus the
time of the poem occupies a little over two years (July 1497-September
1499). Into this the previous four centuries had been ingeniously
worked, but in order to include the sixteenth century fresh devices
were adopted, by which Jupiter (canto ii), Adamastor (v), and Tethys
(x) foretell the future. Almost every land and city connected with
Portuguese history finds a place in the poem. Small wonder that it was
well received by the Portuguese, combining as it did intense patriotism
with hundreds of exotic names. The extraordinary number of 12,000
copies is said to have been printed within a quarter of a century of
Camões’ death,[420] and by 1624 the sale had increased to 20,000 and
his fame had spread throughout the world. It would have been still
stranger if the _murmuradores maldizentes_ had been silent. As early as
1641 we find a critic, João Soares de Brito (1611-64), defending Camões
against the charges of plagiarizing Virgil and of improbabilities of
time and place.[421] Not every one apparently was of the opinion of the
Conde de Idanha, who considered that the only fault of the _Lusiads_
was that it was too long to learn by heart and too short to be able to
go on reading it for ever. Montesquieu found in it something of ‘the
fascination of the Odyssey and the magnificence of the Aeneid’, and
Voltaire, while objecting to its _merveilleux absurde_, adds: ‘Mais la
poésie du style et l’imagination dans l’expression l’ont soutenu, de
même que les beautés de l’exécution ont placé Paul Véronèse parmi les
grands peintres.’
In 1820 appeared José Agostinho de Macedo’s _Censura dos Lusiadas_, in
which he noted with some asperity Camões’ _erros crassissimos_. Prosaic
lines, hyperbole, the use of the supernatural, lack of proportion,[422]
absence of unity, and historical improbabilities are the main heads
of his indictment, and he quotes Racine as to Camões’ ‘icy style’.
He also has much petty detailed criticism, for he finds in Camões a
_notavel falta de grammatica_. And Macedo was certainly right. Most of
the faults he attributes to Camões do exist in the _Lusiads_. Macedo
himself could write more correctly. When he says that the line _Somos
hum dos da ilha, lhe tornou_ (i. 53) is unpoetical (_não tem tintura
de poesia_), we agree; it is sheer prose. We can add other instances:
the line _as que elle para si na cruz tomou_ (i. 7) is as unmusical as
the rhyming of _Heliogabalo_, _Sardanapalo_ (iii. 92), or _impossibil_,
_terribil_ (iv. 54). Only Macedo forgot that genius is justified of its
children, and that these details are all merged in the incomparable
style, imaginative power, and lofty theme of the poem. If a man is
unable to feel the heat of the sun for its spots, we will vainly try
to warm or enlighten him, but it is not pedantic grammarians such as
Macedo[423] who could obscure the fame of Camões. That could only
be done by those whom Macedo calls _os idolatras camoneanos_. Lope
de Vega[424] effusively professed to place the _Lusiads_ above the
_Aeneid_ and the _Iliad_, and Camões’ fellow-countrymen have eagerly
followed suit. He has also suffered much at the hands of translators.
Since the _Lusiads_ is clearly not the equal of the _Iliad_ or the
_Odyssey_, it may be worth while to consider by what reasons Camões
really is one of the world’s greatest poets. There is celestial music
in much that he wrote, in incidents of the _Lusiads_ such as the death
of Inés de Castro,[425] in his eclogues and _canções_ and elegies, in
many of the sonnets, and in the _redondilhas_, most of all perhaps in
the seventy-three heavenly _quintilhas_ beginning _Sobolos rios que
vam_. But other Portuguese poets have been musical; Diogo Bernardez in