No More Learning

"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, Camoens, 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
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.
Camoens 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 Camoens 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 Camoens. 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,
Assaeus first, Autonous, he slew;
Ophites, Dolops, Klytis' son beside;
Opheltius also, Agelaus too,
AEsymnus, and the battle-bide
Hipponous, 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 AEneid, bk. x. line 747, et seq. :--

"By Caedicus Alcathous was slain;
Sacrator laid Hydaspes on the plain;
Orses the strong to greater strength must yield,
He, with Parthenius, were by Rapo killed.
Then brave Messapus Ericetes slew,
Who from Lycaon's blood his lineage drew.