No More Learning

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 Camoens, 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 Camoens 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 Camoens 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 Camoens 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 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.