The Lusiad; Or, The Discovery of India, an Epic Poem
as the Portuguese, but no other nation besides: it is the enchanted
island, called the Island of Bliss, which the fleet finds in its way
home, just rising from the sea, for their comfort, and for their reward.
Camoëns describes that place, as Tasso some years after depicted his
island of Armida. There a supernatural power brings in all the beauties,
and presents all the pleasures which nature can afford, and the heart
may wish for; a goddess, enamoured with Vasco de Gama, carries him to
the top of a high mountain, from whence she shows him all the kingdoms
of the earth, and foretells the fate of Portugal.
"After Camoëns hath given loose to his fancy, in the description of the
pleasures which Gama and his crew enjoyed in the island, he takes care
to inform the reader that he ought to understand by this fiction nothing
but the satisfaction which the virtuous man feels, and the glory which
accrues to him, by the practice of virtue; but the best excuse for such
an invention is the charming style in which it is delivered (if we may
believe the Portuguese), for the beauty of the elocution sometimes makes
amends for the faults of the poet, as the colouring of Rubens makes some
defects in his figures pass unregarded.
"There is _another_ kind of machinery continued throughout all the poem,
which nothing can excuse; that is, an injudicious mixture of the heathen
gods with our religion. Gama in a storm addresses his prayers to Christ,
but it is Venus who comes to his relief; the heroes are Christians, and
the poet heathen. The main design which the Portuguese are supposed to
have (next to promoting their trade) is to propagate Christianity; yet
Jupiter, Bacchus, and Venus, have in their hands all the management of
the voyage. So incongruous a machinery casts a blemish upon the whole
poem; yet it shows at the same time how prevailing are its beauties
since the Portuguese like it with all its faults."
The Lusiad, says Voltaire, contains "a sort of epic poetry unheard of
before. No heroes are wounded a thousand different ways; no woman
enticed away, and the world overturned for her cause." But the very want
of these, in place of supporting the objection intended by Voltaire,
points out the happy judgment and peculiar excellence of Camoëns. If
Homer has given us all the fire and hurry of battles, he has also given
us all the uninteresting, tiresome detail. What reader but must be
tired with the deaths of a thousand heroes, who are never mentioned
before, nor afterwards, in the poem. Yet, in every battle we are wearied
out with such _Gazette_-returns of the slain and wounded as--
"Hector Priamides when Zeus him glory gave,
Assæus first, Autonoüs, he slew;
Ophites, Dolops, Klytis' son beside;
Opheltius also, Agelaüs too,
Æsymnus, and the battle-bide
Hippónoüs, chiefs on Danaian side,
And then, the multitude."
HOMER'S Iliad, bk. xi. 299, et seq.,
(W. G. T. BARTER'S translation.)
And corresponding to it is Virgil's Æneid, bk. x. line 747, et seq.:--
"By Cædicus Alcathoüs was slain;
Sacrator laid Hydaspes on the plain;
Orsès the strong to greater strength must yield,
He, with Parthenius, were by Rapo killed.
Then brave Messapus Ericetès slew,
Who from Lycaón's blood his lineage drew."
DRYDEN'S version.
With, such catalogues is every battle extended; and what can be more
tiresome than such uninteresting descriptions, and their imitations! If
the idea of the battle be raised by such enumeration, still the copy and
original are so near each other that they can never please in two
separate poems. Nor are the greater part of the battles of the Æneid
much more distant than those of the Iliad. Though Virgil with great art
has introduced a Camilla, a Pallas, and a Lausus, still, in many
particulars, and in the action upon the whole, there is such a sameness
with the Iliad, that the learned reader of the Æneid is deprived of the
pleasure inspired by originality. If the man of taste, however, will be
pleased to mark how the genius of a Virgil has managed a war after
Homer, he will certainly be tired with a dozen epic poems in the same
style. Where the siege of a town and battles are the subject of an epic,
there will, of necessity, in the characters and circumstances, be a
resemblance to Homer; and such poem must therefore want originality.
Happily for Tasso, the variation of manners, and his masterly
superiority over Homer in describing his duels, has given to his
Jerusalem an air of novelty. Yet, with all the difference between
Christian and pagan heroes, we have a Priam, an Agamemnon, an Achilles,
etc., armies slaughtered, and a city besieged. In a word, we have a
handsome copy of the Iliad in the Jerusalem Delivered. If some
imitations, however, have been successful, how many other epics of
ancient and modern times have hurried down the stream of oblivion! Some
of their authors had poetical merit, but the fault was in the choice of
their subjects. So fully is the strife of war exhausted by Homer, that
Virgil and Tasso could add to it but little novelty; no wonder,
therefore, that so many epics on battles and sieges have been suffered
to sink into utter neglect. Camoëns, perhaps, did not weigh these
circumstances, but the strength of his poetical genius directed him. He
could not but feel what it was to read Virgil after Homer; and the
original turn and force of his mind led him from the beaten track of
Helen's and Lavinia's, Achilles's and Hector's sieges and slaughters,
where the hero hews down, and drives to flight, whole armies with his
own sword. Camoëns was the first who wooed the modern Epic Muse, and she
gave him the wreath of a first lover; a sort of epic poetry unheard of
before; or, as Voltaire calls it, _une nouvelle espèce d'epopée_; and
the grandest subject it is (of profane history) which the world has ever
beheld.[14] A voyage esteemed too great for man to dare; the adventures
of this voyage through unknown oceans deemed unnavigable; the eastern
world happily discovered, and for ever indissolubly joined and given to
the western; the grand Portuguese empire in the East founded; the
humanization of mankind, and universal commerce the consequence! What
are the adventures of an old, fabulous hero's arrival in Britain, what
are Greece and Latium in arms for a woman compared to this! Troy is in
ashes, and even the Roman empire is no more. But the effects of the
voyage, adventures, and bravery of the hero of the Lusiad will be felt
and beheld, and perhaps increase in importance, while the world shall
remain.
Happy in his choice, happy also was the genius of Camoëns in the method
of pursuing his subject. He has not, like Tasso, given it a total
appearance of fiction; nor has he, like Lucan, excluded allegory and
poetical machinery. Whether he intended it or not (for his genius was
sufficient to suggest its propriety), the judicious precept of
Petronius[15] is the model of the Lusiad. That elegant writer proposes a
poem on the civil war, and no poem, ancient or modern, merits the
character there sketched out in any degree comparative to the Lusiad. A
truth of history is preserved; yet, what is improper for the historian,
the ministry of Heaven is employed, and the free spirit of poetry throws
itself into fictions which makes the whole appear as an effusion of
prophetic fury, and not like a rigid detail of facts, given under the
sanction of witnesses. Contrary to Lucan, who, in the above rules, drawn
from the nature of poetry, is severely condemned by Petronius, Camoëns
conducts his poem _per ambages Deorumque ministeria_. The apparition,
which in the night hovers athwart the fleet near the Cape of Good Hope,
is the grandest fiction in human composition; the invention his own! In
the Island of Venus, the use of which fiction in an epic poem is also
his own, he has given the completest assemblage of all the flowers which
have ever adorned the bowers of love. And, never was the _furentis animi
vaticinatio_ more conspicuously displayed than in the prophetic song,
the view of the spheres, and the globe of the earth. Tasso's imitation
of the Island of Venus is not equal to the original; and, though
"Virgil's myrtles[16] dropping blood are nothing to Tasso's enchanted
forest," what are all Ismeno's enchantments to the grandeur and horror
of the appearance, prophecy, and vanishment of the spectre of
Camoëns![17] It has long been agreed among critics, that the solemnity
of religious observances gives great dignity to the historical narrative
of epic poetry. Camoëns, in the embarkation of the fleet, and in several
other places, is peculiarly happy in the dignity of religious
allusions. Manners and character are also required in the epic poem. But
all the epics which have appeared are, except two, mere copies of the
Iliad in these respects. Every one has its Agamemnon, Achilles, Ajax,
and Ulysses; its calm, furious, gross, and intelligent hero. Camoëns and
Milton happily left this beaten track, this exhausted field, and have
given us pictures of manners unknown in the Iliad, the Æneid, and all
those poems which may be classed with the Thebaid. The Lusiad abounds
with pictures of manners, from those of the highest chivalry to those of
the rudest, fiercest, and most innocent barbarism. In the fifth, sixth,
and ninth books, Leonardo and Veloso are painted in stronger colours
than any of the inferior characters in Virgil. But _character_, indeed,
is not the excellence of the Æneid. That of Monzaida, the friend of
Gama, is much superior to that of Achates. The base, selfish, perfidious
and cruel character of the Zamorim and the Moors, are painted in the
strongest colours; and the character of Gama himself is that of the
finished hero. His cool command of his passions, his deep sagacity, his
fixed intrepidity, his tenderness of heart, his manly piety, and his
high enthusiasm in the love of his country are all displayed in the
superlative degree. Let him who objects the want of character to the
Lusiad, beware lest he stumble upon its praise; lest he only say, it
wants an Achilles, a Hector, and a Priam. And, to the novelty of the
manners of the Lusiad let the novelty of fire-arms also be added. It has
been said that the buckler, the bow, and the spear, must continue the
arms of poetry. Yet, however unsuccessful others may have been, Camoëns
has proved that fire-arms may be introduced with the greatest dignity,
and the finest effect in the epic poem.
As the grand interest of commerce and of mankind forms the subject of
the Lusiad, so, with great propriety, as necessary accompaniments to the
voyage of his hero, the author has given poetical pictures of the four
parts of the world--in the third book a view of Europe; in the fifth, a
view of Africa; and in the tenth, a picture of Asia and America. Homer
and Virgil have been highly praised for their judgment in the choice of
subjects which interested their countrymen, and Statius has been as
severely condemned for his uninteresting choice. But, though the subject
of Camoëns be particularly interesting to his own countrymen, it has
also the peculiar happiness to be the poem of every trading nation. It
is the epic poem of the birth of commerce, and, in a particular manner,
the epic poem of whatever country has the control and possession of the
commerce of India.[18]
An unexhausted fertility and variety of poetical description, an
unexhausted elevation of sentiment, and a constant tenor of the grand
simplicity of diction, complete the character of the Lusiad of Camoëns:
a poem which, though it has hitherto received from the public most
unmerited neglect, and from the critics most flagrant injustice, was yet
better understood by the greatest poet of Italy. Tasso never did his