The Lusiad; Or, The Discovery of India, an Epic Poem
prison. After all the delay of bringing witnesses, Camoëns, in a public
trial, fully refuted every accusation against his conduct while
commissary at Macao, and his enemies were loaded with ignominy and
reproach. But Camoëns had some creditors; and these detained him in
prison a considerable time, till the gentlemen of Goa began to be
ashamed that a man of his singular merit should experience such
treatment among them. He was set at liberty; and again he assumed the
profession of arms, and received the allowance of a
gentleman-volunteer, a character at that time common in Portuguese
India. Soon after, Pedro Barreto (appointed governor of the fort of
Sofála), by high promises, allured the poet to attend him thither. The
governor of a distant fort, in a barbarous country, shares in some
measure the fate of an exile. Yet, though the only motive of Barreto
was, in this unpleasant situation, to retain the conversation of Camoëns
at his table, it was his least care to render the life of his guest
agreeable. Chagrined with his treatment, and a considerable time having
elapsed in vain dependence upon Barreto, Camoëns resolved to return to
his native country. A ship, on the homeward voyage, at this time touched
at Sofála, and several gentlemen[10] who were on board were desirous
that Camoëns should accompany them. But this the governor ungenerously
endeavoured to prevent, and charged him with a debt for board. Anthony
de Cabral, however, and Hector de Sylveyra, paid the demand, and
Camoëns, says Faria, and the honour of Barreto were sold together.
After an absence of sixteen years, Camoëns, in 1569, returned to Lisbon,
unhappy even in his arrival, for the pestilence then raged in that city,
and prevented his publishing for three years. At last, in 1572, he
printed his Lusiad, which, in the opening of the first book, in a most
elegant turn of compliment, he addressed to his prince, King Sebastian,
then in his eighteenth year. The king, says the French translator, was
so pleased with his merit, that he gave the author a pension of 4000
reals, on condition that he should reside at court. But this salary,
says the same writer, was withdrawn by Cardinal Henry, who succeeded to
the crown of Portugal, lost by Sebastian at the battle of Alcazar.
But this story of the pension is very doubtful. Correa and other
contemporary authors do not mention it, though some late writers have
given credit to it. If Camoëns, however, had a pension, it is highly
probable that Henry deprived him of it. While Sebastian was devoted to
the chase, his grand-uncle, the cardinal, presided at the council board,
and Camoëns, in his address to the king, which closes the Lusiad,
advises him to exclude the clergy from State affairs. It was easy to see
that the cardinal was here intended. And Henry, besides, was one of
those statesmen who can perceive no benefit resulting to the public
from elegant literature. But it ought also to be added in completion of
his character, that under the narrow views and weak hands of this Henry,
the kingdom of Portugal fell into utter ruin; and on his death, which
closed a short inglorious reign, the crown of Lisbon, after a faint
struggle, was annexed to that of Spain. Such was the degeneracy of the
Portuguese, a degeneracy lamented in vain by Camoëns, whose observation
of it was imputed to him as a crime.
Though the great[11] patron of theological literature--a species the
reverse of that of Camoëns--certain it is, that the author of the Lusiad
was utterly neglected by Henry, under whose inglorious reign he died in
all the misery of poverty. By some, it is said, he died in an
almshouse. It appears, however, that he had not even the certainty of
subsistence which these houses provide. He had a black servant, who had
grown old with him, and who had long experienced his master's humanity.
This grateful dependant, a native of Java, who, according to some
writers, saved his master's life in the unhappy shipwreck where he lost
his effects, begged in the streets of Lisbon for the only man in
Portugal on whom God had bestowed those talents which have a tendency to
erect the spirit of a downward age. To the eye of a careful observer,
the fate of Camoëns throws great light on that of his country, and will
appear strictly connected with it. The same ignorance, the same
degenerate spirit, which suffered Camoëns to depend on his share of the
alms begged in the streets by his old hoary servant--the same spirit
which caused this, sank the kingdom of Portugal into the most abject
vassalage ever experienced by a conquered nation. While the grandees of
Portugal were blind to the ruin which impended over them, Camoëns beheld
it with a pungency of grief which hastened his end. In one of his
letters he has these remarkable words, "_Em fim accaberey à vida, e
verràm todos que fuy afeiçoada a minho patria_," etc.--"I am ending the
course of my life, the world will witness how I have loved my country. I
have returned, not only to die in her bosom, but to die with her." In
another letter, written a little before his death, he thus, yet with
dignity, complains, "Who has seen on so small a theatre as my poor bed,
such a representation of the disappointments of Fortune. And I, as if
she could not herself subdue me, I have yielded and become of her party;
for it were wild audacity to hope to surmount such accumulated evils."
In this unhappy situation, in 1579, in his sixty-second year, the year
after the fatal defeat of Don Sebastian, died Luis de Camoëns, the
greatest literary genius ever produced by Portugal; in martial courage
and spirit of honour nothing inferior to her greatest heroes. And in a
manner suitable to the poverty in which he died was he buried. Soon
after, however, many epitaphs honoured his memory; the greatness of his
merit was universally confessed, and his Lusiad was translated into
various languages.[12] Nor ought it to be omitted, that the man so
miserably neglected by the weak king Henry, was earnestly enquired after
by Philip of Spain when he assumed the crown of Lisbon. When Philip
heard that Camoëns was dead, both his words and his countenance
expressed his disappointment and grief.
From the whole tenor of his life, and from that spirit which glows
throughout the Lusiad, it evidently appears that the courage and manners
of Camoëns flowed from true greatness and dignity of soul. Though his
polished conversation was often courted by the great, he appears so
distant from servility that his imprudence in this respect is by some
highly blamed. Yet the instances of it by no means deserve that severity
of censure with which some writers have condemned him. Unconscious of
the feelings of a Camoëns, they knew not that a carelessness in securing
the smiles of fortune, and an open honesty of indignation, are almost
inseparable from the enthusiasm of fine imagination. The truth is, the
man possessed of true genius feels his greatest happiness in the
pursuits and excursions of the mind, and therefore makes an estimate of
things very different from that of him whose unremitting attention is
devoted to his external interest. The profusion of Camoëns is also
censured. Had he dissipated the wealth he acquired at Macao, his
profusion indeed had been criminal; but it does not appear that he ever
enjoyed any other opportunity of acquiring independence. But Camoëns was
unfortunate, and the unfortunate man is viewed--
"Through the dim shade his fate casts o'er him:
A shade that spreads its evening darkness o'er
His brightest virtues, while it shows his foibles
Crowding and obvious as the midnight stars,
Which, in the sunshine of prosperity
Never had been descried."
Yet, after the strictest discussion, when all the causes are weighed
together, the misfortunes of Camoëns will appear the fault and disgrace
of his age and country, and not of the man. His talents would have
secured him an apartment in the palace of Augustus, but such talents are
a curse to their possessor in an illiterate nation. In a beautiful,
digressive exclamation at the end of the Lusiad, he affords us a
striking view of the neglect which he experienced. Having mentioned how
the greatest heroes of antiquity revered and cherished the muse, he thus
characterizes the nobility of his own age and country.
"Alas! on Tago's hapless shore alone
The muse is slighted, and her charms unknown;
For this, no Virgil here attunes the lyre,
No Homer here awakes the hero's fire;
Unheard, in vain their native poet sings,
And cold neglect weighs dawn the muse's wings."
In such an age, and among such a barbarous nobility, what but wretched
neglect could be the fate of a Camoëns! After all, however, if he was
imprudent on his first appearance at the court of John III.; if the
honesty of his indignation led him into great imprudence, as certainly
it did, when at Goa he satirised the viceroy and the first persons in
power; yet let it also be remembered, that "The gifts of imagination
bring the heaviest task upon the vigilance of reason; and to bear those
faculties with unerring rectitude, or invariable propriety, requires a
degree of firmness and of cool attention, which doth not always attend
the higher gifts of the mind. Yet, difficult as nature herself seems to
have rendered the task of regularity to genius, it is the supreme
consolation of dullness and of folly to point with Gothic triumph to
those excesses which are the overflowings of faculties they never
enjoyed. Perfectly unconscious that they are indebted to their stupidity
for the consistency of their conduct, they plume themselves on an
imaginary virtue which has its origin in what is really their
disgrace.--Let such, if such dare approach the shrine of Camoëns,
withdraw to a respectful distance; and should they behold the ruins of
genius, or the weakness of an exalted mind, let them be taught to lament
that nature has left the noblest of her works imperfect."[13]
DISSERTATION ON THE LUSIAD, AND ON EPIC POETRY,
BY THE TRANSLATOR.
When Voltaire was in England, previous to his publication of his
Henriade, he published in English an essay on the epic poetry of the
European nations. In this he both highly praised, and severely attacked,
the Lusiad. In his French editions of this essay, he has made various
alterations, at different times, in the article on Camoëns. It is not,
however, improper to premise, that some most amazing falsities will be
here detected; the gross misrepresentation of every objection refuted;
and demonstration brought, that when Voltaire wrote his English essay,
his knowledge of the Lusiad was entirely borrowed from the bold, harsh,
unpoetical version of Fanshaw.
"While Trissino," says Voltaire, "was clearing away the rubbish in
Italy, which barbarity and ignorance had heaped up for ten centuries in
the way of the arts and sciences, Camoëns, in Portugal, steered a new
course, and acquired a reputation which lasts still among his countrymen
who pay as much respect to his memory as the English to Milton."
Among other passages of the Lusiad which he criticises is that where
"Adamastor, the giant of the Cape of Storms, appears to them, walking in
the depth of the sea; his head reaches to the clouds; the storms, the
winds, the thunders, and the lightnings hang about him; his arms are
extended over the waves. It is the guardian of that foreign ocean,
unploughed before by any ship. He complains of being obliged to submit
to fate, and to the audacious undertaking of the Portuguese, and
foretells them all the misfortunes they must undergo in the Indies. I
believe that such a fiction would be thought noble and proper in all
ages, and in all nations.
"There is another, which perhaps would have pleased the Italians as well