The Lusiad; Or, The Discovery of India, an Epic Poem
[617] _Awed by his fame._--That brave, generous spirit, which prompted
Camoëns to condemn the great Albuquerque for injustice to a common
soldier, has here deserted him. In place of poetical compliment, on the
terrors of his name, Noronha deserved infamy. The siege of Dio, it is
true, was raised on the report of his approach, but that report was the
stratagem of Coje Zofar, one of the general officers of the assailants.
The delays of Noronha were as highly blamable as his treatment of his
predecessor, the excellent Nunio, was unworthy of a gentleman.
[618] _A son of thine, O Gama._--Stephen de Gama.
[619] _A vet'ran, fam'd on Brazil's shore._--Martin Alonzo de Souza. He
was celebrated for clearing the coast of Brazil of several pirates, who
were formidable to that infant colony.
[620] _O'er blood-stain'd ground._--This is as near the original as
elegance will allow--_de sangue cheyo_--which Fanshaw has thus punned:--
"With no little loss,
Sending him home again by _Weeping-Cross_"--
a place near Banbury in Oxfordshire.
[621] Cape Comorin, the southernmost point of India.--_Ed._
[622] _The Rumien fierce, who boasts the name of Rome._--When the
victories of the Portuguese began to overspread the East, several Indian
princes, by the counsels of the Moors, applied for assistance to the
Sultan of Egypt, and the Grand Signior. The troops of these Mohammedan
princes were in the highest reputation for bravery, and though, composed
of many different nations, were known among the orientals by one common
name. Ignorance delights in the marvellous. The history of ancient Rome
made the same figure among the easterns, as that of the fabulous, or
heroic, ages does with us, with this difference, it was better believed.
The Turks of Roumania pretended to be the descendants of the Roman
conquerors, and the Indians gave them and their auxiliaries the name of
Rum{=e}s, or Romans. In the same manner, the fame of Godfrey in the East
conferred the name of Franks on all the western Christians, who, on
their part, gave the name of Moors to all the Mohammedans of the East.
[623] _No hope, bold Mascarene._--The commander of Diu, or Dio, during
this siege, one of the most memorable in the Portuguese history.
[624] _Fierce Hydal-Kan._--The title of the lords or princes of Decan,
who in their wars with the Portuguese have sometimes brought 400,000 men
into the field. The prince here mentioned, after many revolts, was at
last finally subdued by Don John de Castro, the fourth viceroy of India,
with whose reign our poet judiciously ends the prophetic song.
Albuquerque laid the plan, and Castro completed the system of the
Portuguese empire in the East. It is with propriety, therefore, that the
prophecy given to GAMA is here summed up. Nor is the discretion of
Camoëns in this instance inferior to his judgment. He is now within a
few years of his own times, when he himself was upon the scene in India.
But whatever he had said of his contemporaries would have been liable to
misconstruction, and every sentence would have been branded with the
epithets of flattery or malice. A little poet would have been happy in
such an opportunity to resent his wrongs. But the silent contempt of
Camoëns does him true honour.
In this historical song, as already hinted, the translator has been
attentive, as much as he could, to throw it into these universal
languages, the picturesque and characteristic. To convey the sublimest
instruction to princes, is, according to Aristotle, the peculiar
province of the epic muse. The striking points of view in which the
different characters of the governors of India are here placed, are in
the most happy conformity to this ingenious canon of the Stagyrite.
[625]
_In whirling circles now they fell, now rose,
Yet never rose nor fell.--_
The motions of the heavenly bodies, in every system, bear at all times
the same uniform relation to each other; these expressions, therefore,
are strictly just. The first relates to the appearance, the second to
the reality. Thus, while to us the sun appears to go down, to more
western inhabitants of the globe he appears to rise, and while he rises
to us, he is going down to the more eastern; the difference being
entirely relative to the various parts of the earth. And in this the
expressions of our poet are equally applicable to the Ptolemaic and
Copernican systems. The ancient hypothesis which made our earth the
centre of the universe, is the system adopted by Camoëns, a happiness,
in the opinion of the translator, to the English Lusiad. The new system
is so well known, that a poetical description of it would have been no
novelty to the English reader. The other has not only that advantage in
its favour: but this description is perhaps the finest and fullest that
ever was given of it in poetry, that of Lucretius, l. v. being chiefly
argumentative, and therefore less picturesque.
Our author studied at the university of Coimbra, where the ancient
system and other doctrines of the Aristotelians then, and long
afterward, prevailed.
[626] _He holds His loftiest state._--Called by the old philosophers and
school divines the sensorium of the Deity.
[627] _These spheres behold._--According to the Peripatetics, the
universe consisted of eleven spheres inclosed within each other; as
Fanshaw has familiarly expressed it by a simile which he has lent our
author. The first of these spheres, he says--
"Doth (_as in a nest
Of boxes_) all the other orbs comprise."
In their accounts of this first-mentioned, but eleventh, sphere, which
they called the Empyrean, or heaven of the blest, the disciples of
Aristotle, and the Arab Moors, gave loose to all the warmth of
imagination. And several of the Christian fathers applied to it the
descriptions of heaven which are found in the Holy Scripture.
[628] _Hence motion darts its force._--This is the tenth sphere, the
_Primum Mobile_ of the ancient system. To account for the appearances of
the heavens, the Peripatetics ascribed a double motion to it. While its
influence drew the other orbs from east to west, they supposed it had a
motion of its own from west to east. To effect this, the ponderous
weight and interposition of the ninth sphere, or crystalline heaven, was
necessary. The ancient astronomers observed that the stars shifted their
places. This they called the motion of the crystalline heaven, expressed
by our poet at the rate of one pace during two hundred solar years. The
famous Arab astronomer, Abulhasan, in his Meadows of Gold, calculates
the revolution of this sphere to consist of 49,000 of our years. But
modern discoveries have not only corrected the calculation,{*} but have
also ascertained the reason of the apparent motion of the fixed stars.
The earth is not a perfect sphere; the quantity of matter is greater at
the equator; hence the earth turns on her axis in a rocking motion,
revolving round the axis of the ecliptic, which is called the procession
of the equinoxes, and makes the stars seem to shift their places at
about the rate of a degree in 72 years; according to which all the stars
seem to perform one revolution in the space of 25,920 years, after which
they return exactly to the same situation as at the beginning of this
period. However imperfect in their calculations, the Chaldean
astronomers perceived that the motions of the heavens composed one great
revolution. This they called the _annus magnus_, which those who did not
understand them mistook for a restoration of all things to their first
originals.
{*} However deficient the astronomy of Abulhasan may be, it is nothing
to the calculation of his prophet Mohammed, who tells his disciples,
that the stars were each about the bigness of a house, and hung from the
sky on chains of gold.
[629] _And binds the starry sphere._--This was called the firmament, or
eighth heaven. Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Apollo, Venus, Mercury, and Diana,
were the planets which gave name to, and whose orbits composed, the
other spheres or heavens.
[630] _In shining frost the Northern Chariot rides._--Commonly called
Charles' Wain. Andromeda was the daughter of Cepheus, king of Ethiopia,
and of Cassiope. Cassiope boasted that she and her daughter were more
beautiful than Juno and the Nereids. Andromeda, to appease the goddess,
was, at her father's command, chained to a rock to be devoured by a sea
monster, but was saved by Perseus, who obtained of Jupiter that all the
family should be placed among the stars. Orion was a hunter, who, for an
attempt on Diana, was stung to death by a serpent. The star of his name
portends tempests. The Dogs; fable gives this honour to those of
different hunters. The faithful dog of Erigone, however, that died mad
with grief for the death of his mistress, has the best title to preside
over the dog-days. The Swan; whose form Jupiter borrowed to enjoy Leda.
The Hare, when pursued by Orion, was saved by Mercury, and placed in
heaven, to signify that Mercury presides over melancholy dispositions.
The Lyre, with which Orpheus charmed Pluto. The Dragon which guarded the
golden apples of the Hesperides, and the ship Argo complete the number
of the constellations mentioned by Camoëns. If our author has blended
the appearances of heaven with those of the painted artificial sphere,
it is in the manner of the classics. Ovid, in particular, thus describes
the heavens, in the second book of his Metamorphoses.
[631] _Such are their laws impress'd by God's dread will._--Though a
modern narrative of gallant adventures by no means requires the
supposition of a particular Providence, that supposition, however, is
absolutely necessary to the grandeur of an epic poem. The great examples
of Homer and Virgil prove it; and Camoëns understood and felt its force.
While his fleet combat all the horrors of unploughed oceans, we do not
view his heroes as idle wanderers; the care of heaven gives their voyage
the greatest importance. When GAMA falls on his knees and spreads his
hands to heaven on the discovery of India, we are presented with a
figure infinitely more noble than that of the most successful conqueror
who is supposed to act under the influence of fatalism or chance. The
human mind is conscious of its own weakness. It expects an elevation in
poetry, and demands a degree of importance superior to the caprices of
unmeaning accident. The poetical reader cannot admire the hero who is
subject to such blind fortuity. He appears to us with an abject,
uninteresting littleness. Our poetical ideas of permanent greatness
demand a GAMA, a hero whose enterprises and whose person interest the
care of Heaven and the happiness of his people. Nor must this
supposition be confined merely to the machinery. The reason why it
pleases, also requires, that the supposition should be uniform
throughout the whole poem. Virgil, by dismissing Eneas through the ivory
gate of Elysium, has hinted that all his pictures of a future state were
merely dreams, and has thus destroyed the highest merit of the
compliment to his patron Augustus. But Camoëns has certainly been more
happy. A fair opportunity offered itself to indulge the opinions of
Lucretius and the Academic Grove; but Camoëns, in ascribing the
government of the universe to the will of God, has not only preserved
the philosophy of his poem perfectly uniform, but has also shown that
the Peripatetic system is, in this instance, exactly conformable to the
Newtonian.
Though the Author of nature has placed man in a state of moral agency,
and made his happiness and misery to depend upon it, and though every
page of human history is stained with the tears of injured innocence and
the triumphs of guilt, with miseries which must affect a moral, or