No More Learning

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 Camoens! 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 Camoens,
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 Camoens. 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, 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.