SOURCE: “The Place of Mythology in The Lusiads,” in Comparative Literature, Vol. 6, No. 2, Spring 1954, pp. 97-122.

[In this essay, Pierce offers an overview of past critical analyses of Camões' incorporation of pagan mythology into The Lusiads. The critic suggests that Camões was able to include references to pagan gods in his Christian epic by presenting them as merely allegorical figures.]

It is a surprising fact that a poem of the stature of Camões' epic, which has for so long been the subject of much comment and criticism, should still present a major problem of interpretation.¹ The problem may be put briefly: Camões envisages his theme from the comprehensive standpoint common to his age, that is, he sees human history as including and being ultimately justified by a divine plan; but this plan manifests itself through a whole pagan supernatural scheme inserted between Vasco da Gama and the Christian God. What does Camões mean by this unusual combination of elements not found in any of his contemporaries in the epos?² Most critics show at some point of their exegesis an uneasiness at the way the complicated pattern unfolds itself, and have never felt quite sure what the total picture of The Lusiads stands for. This is partly because Camões presents the reader with a new and startling relationship of the truth of history and religion and the familiar adornments of poetry. The uncertainty is also due, one must admit, to the great success of Camões in giving full sensuous life to his imaginative ideas (for he is surely one of the archseducers of all poetry).

The present writer does not pretend to have discovered the one and only explanation, but he does believe that a more satisfactory and acceptable version of the question than that usually given can be arrived at by drawing attention both to the early criticism of The Lusiads and, also, to the sixteenth-century attitude towards pagan mythology and its use in the art of a Christian society. After a survey of the critical history of the subject, an attempt will be made to place Camões in the circumstances of theory and practice in which he wrote and, thus, to let him speak for himself. Perhaps it will then be possible to see how far his poem lives up to or falls below contemporary ideals of poetry, and to explain why it has caused such misunderstanding in the most important matter of his supernatural machinery.

I

Camões criticism really begins with the well-known statement of Frei Bertholameu [sic] Ferreira, censor of the Holy Office, approving the first edition of 1572:

não achey … cousa algũa escandalosa, nem contraria à fe & bõs costumes, somente me pareceo que era necessario aduertir os Lectores que o Autor pera encarecer a difficultade da nauegação & entrada dos Portugueses na India, vsa de hũa fiçao dos Deoses dos Gentios, E ainda que Sancto Augustinho nas suas Retractações se retracte de ter chamado nos liuros que compos … aas Musas Deosas. Toda via como isto he Poesia & fingimento, & o Autor como poeta, não pretenda mais que ornar o estilo Poetico, não tiuemos por inconueniente yr esta fabula dos Deuses na obra conhecendo a por tal, & ficando sempre salua a verdade de nossa sancta fe, que todos os Deoses dos Gētios sam Demonios …³

Here, within the few lines of a common legal formula, is expressed what to Camões and his contemporaries was a perfectly ordinary and accepted idea concerning the use of pagan myths in Christian poetry, but what would appear to be a concept of unusual difficulty and subtlety for the modern mind, trained as it is in a very different acceptance of the literary myth and the uses of symbols.

The next stage, surprisingly, is reached when (in the famous “Piscos” edition of 1584) the same censor (together with three others) makes this declaration: “assim emendado como agora vai, não tem cousa contra fé e os bõs costumes.”⁴ This short phrase is the justification for the extensive excisions of every reference to “gods” and “goddesses” and the substitution of their specific names or some short euphemism. There is also considerable expurgation in this edition in Canto II, where Venus is portrayed as imploring the help of Jupiter for the Portuguese and the poet describes her seductive charms in most plastic detail; and the sensuous intensity of the scenes on the Isle of Love (Canto IX) is reduced by the suppression of whole stanzas. These modifications, clearly dictated by religious and moral scruples,⁵ are those of specific relevance to the subject of this article (others suggested by political qualms do not concern us here).

The prudishness displayed in the 1584 edition was, however, quickly set aside, and is not typical of an age when the Church had yet again (after Trent) taken up a position of toleration regarding the use of mythology and had reaffirmed the most favored of the traditional attitudes, that of moral allegorism. Thus, the Jesuit censor of the 1595 edition restored for the most part the original text and reversed his predecessors' decisions:

Não lhe borrei os vocábulos de que o Autor muitas vezes vsa e que já alguns lhe notaram, como falar em deuses … porque tal linguagem a autorizam as Escrituras e os Padres da Igreja, ao falar-se dos deuses do paganismo.

The edition of 1609 was the last one to bear any traces of retouching for moral reasons.⁶

It will now be apparent that The Lusiads during the first generation after its appearance was submitted to the new post-Renaissance critical canons, that it contained certain passages which to some people were questionable on grounds of propriety, but that it stood the test and emerged triumphant.⁷ If any further proof is required, it can be found abundantly in the great Spanish commentary, Las Lusiadas de Luis de Camoens comentadas (1639) of Manoel Faria e Sousa, the most enthusiastic and intelligent of all the poet's critics and one who is often mentioned but, apparently, seldom consulted. This humanist brought the vast classical erudition and the keen awareness of a rich mind and imagination to the task of giving Camões' poem the serious attention generally devoted to the Aeneid. Faria interprets Camões' use of pagan mythology as part of the inclusive attitude of mind that could submit history (that is God, the world, man, and the Devil) to the transmutation of poetry, which as a “representacion” involves “encarecimiento” or “exageracion.” That is, for Faria poetry is essentially rhetorical, and he thus sees Camões using his “adornos” to give full imaginative significance to the voyage of Vasco da Gama (as indeed the 1572 censor had also explained the use of myth): “por exageracion del poder de Dios le llamò Jupiter el poeta” (Tomo I, col. 196). Venus comes to allegorize the Guardian Angel and Bacchus to stand for the Devil; that is, the pagan gods are to be taken as rhetorical figures and as poetic vehicles within an exclusively Christian scheme of things.⁸ Faria e Sousa will be discussed in some detail below; for the moment it will be enough to emphasize the completeness of his allegorization of The Lusiads, and also to point out that such a critical approach, whatever its merits (and they are many), can become enmeshed in its own subtleties.⁹ But at least Faria took the whole poem and presented a commentary which, on its own premises, explained everything and drew together the rich variety of Camões' imagination into a satisfying rational statement. As it stands, Faria's four-volume work remains the most substantial piece of Camões scholarship. It came out a bare sixty years after the first edition and, apart from being a magnificent tribute, crowns the critical appreciation of a generation that took its poetry very seriously.¹⁰

An intermediate stage between the enthusiasm for a restless and witty rhetoric such as we have in the case of Faria, on the one hand, and the restriction and restraint of a Voltaire, on the other, is provided by one of the theoreticians of classicisme (as distinct from the classicism of Spain, Portugal, and other countries), namely the Jesuit René Rapin, in his precise and elegantly written Réflexions sur l'éloquence et la poétique (1674). This work, published only a generation after Faria's commentary, contains a short survey of European vernacular literature, the achievements of which are rigorously tested by reference to the Aristotelian rules, already outlined and discussed, and are as often as not found wanting (Lope de Vega and Cervantes are among the few considered worthy of praise). Fr. Rapin includes The Lusiads in his judgments of the Renaissance epic and each mention brings fresh censure. Like most modern epics Camões's has “ny proportion dans le dessein, ny justesse dans la pensée, ny exactitude dans l'expression”; Camões is also castigated for his supernatural scheme: “le Camoëns, qui parle sans discretion de Vénus, de Bacchus, & des autres divinitez profanes dans un Poëme Christien”; and finally:

Le Camoëns, qui est le seul Poëte héroique de Portugal, n'a pensé qu'à exprimer l'orgueil de sa nation, en son Poëme de la conqueste des Indes. Car il est fier & fastueux dans sa composition, mais il a peu de discernement & peu de conduite.¹¹

Thus, Camões was lumped with all those who experimented too freely with the rules as understood by the new orthodoxy of the French Academy. This was a thoroughgoing reassessment and, however narrowing and pedantic, still possessed considerable critical vitality. When the rules were taken over by succeeding generations in the eighteenth century, they became a mortiferous set of canons that extinguished all poetic originality and brought about the impoverishment of the imagination. This was already apparent when Voltaire, himself a pupil of the Jesuits and always loyal to their literary standards as illustrated by Rapin's writings, brought out his Essai sur la poésie épique (final form, 1742). Voltaire treats The Lusiads with summary justice, praising the episodes of Inês de Castro and Adamastor but condemning the supernatural machinery and the general shape and structure of the poem, which is only saved because “la poésie du style et l'imagination dans l'expression l'ont soutenu.” As for the supernatural, he regards the allegorical interpretation (perpetuated in the commentary by Duperron et Castera to his French translation of 1735 mentioned by Voltaire) with ironic tolerance: “à la bonne heure je ne m'y oppose pas, mais j'avoue que je ne m'en serais pas aperçu. Cette allégorie nouvelle rendra raison de tout …”; he then goes on to pass final judgment: “A parler sérieusement, un merveilleux si absurde défigure tout l'ouvrage aux yeux des lecteurs sensés.” In the circumstances this bigoted statement (which is of a whole with the treatment of other modern epic poets in the same essay) is a pretty fair example of one important section of eighteenth-century opinion, that is, its avant-garde, which tended to adopt a very negative, even reactionary attitude towards the imagination and its rights.¹² The trenchant assurance of the young poet of La Henriade became the fixed conviction of the old man of Ferney a lifetime later; in this matter, at least, the passage of fifty years (Voltaire's essay came out first, in English, in 1726) marked no intellectual development whatsoever.¹³ It is not to be expected that the author of The Life of Charles XII would share Faria's view of history; nor could Voltaire project himself into the past (as post-1800 critics were to do), which would have been his only hope of understanding Camões, once his view of European humanism had become identified with the pruderies of the grand siècle. Any suggestion of allegorism is scorned,¹⁴ and any imaginative daring deprecated; thus he ridicules Camões' assumption that the king of Melinde knew of Homer and Virgil and Milton's depiction of Satan's army using cannons.

The eighteenth century was not, however, unanimous in this rigidity of taste, and it is this fact which puts the age outside any comfortable Voltairean generalization. Montesquieu spoke warmly, if briefly, of The Lusiads,¹⁵ while contemporary translations into English and French argue an abiding interest for the polite reader.¹⁶ More significant, however, is the polemic produced by Voltaire's criticism. In 1776 William Julius Mickle published his English translation of the poem (the first since Fanshaw's of 1655), and accompanied it with a critical apparatus and a show of erudition that make him a kind of eighteenth-century Faria e Sousa.¹⁷ Mickle's presentation and criticism is still the most comprehensive and serious piece of Camões scholarship after the commentary of the preceding century. Its chief relevance to this article is his detailed attack on Voltaire,¹⁸ and his own explanation of the mythological machinery (which is contained in his “Dissertation”). The several gross errors of fact in the first edition of Voltaire's essay are singled out for censure; and it is pointed out that the Frenchman's initial knowledge of The Lusiads was based only on a cursory reading of Fanshaw and, at best, on the prose translation of Duperron.¹⁹ What annoyed Mickle keenly was the fact that “this criticism, though most superficial and erroneous, has been generally esteemed throughout Europe, as the true character of that poem.”²⁰ Mickle gives his own cogent interpretations of Camões' supernatural machinery. We are asked to remember that this “like the machinery of Homer and Virgil … is also allegorical,” a fact which he stresses frequently, and which, incidentally, can be misleading; for Mickle used the word in the loose humanistic sense to include pure allegory, symbolism, and personification. Still his statement that “the names of these deities became merely allegorical, such also ought to be the actions ascribed to them. And Camoens has strictly adhered to this rule” is a good enough answer to Voltaire. According to Mickle, Camões' Venus is portrayed as the symbol of Divine Love corresponding to her spiritual aspect as Urania (this, of course, had been the contention of Faria e Sousa, from whom it was taken by Duperron, whose commentary was closely followed by Mickle). At the same time we are told that “In the age of Camões, Bacchus was esteemed a real demon,” and, thus, becomes a fitting symbol of the opposing forces. The right to use pagan mythology is upheld by an appeal to its prestige and antiquity. Putting Camões's machinery above that of any modern epic, Mickle summarizes his thesis thus:

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 make the whole appear as an effusion of prophetic fury, and not like a rigid detail of facts given under the sanction of witnesses.

Mickle argues his case with a wealth of detail and example from ancient and modern literature, including La Henriade, which he uses as evidence against its author; the final conclusion is that The Lusiads is in certain respects the greatest of modern epics and one of the best ever written. Before leaving Mickle, it must be said, however, that he does not always argue fairly, but sometimes overstretches his case in order to defeat Voltaire's contentions. Thus, the action on the Isle of Love “is chaste as the first loves of Adam and Eve in Milton, and entirely free from that grossness … often to be found in Dante, Ariosto, Spenser, and in Milton himself.” This is surely a piece of special pleading; it introduces unhelpful parallels and is not a fair answer to Voltaire. Mickle also holds that “in his machinery, as in his historical parts, there is no mixture of Pagan and Christian personages … It is the historical opposition or concert of Christian and Pagan ideas which forms the absurd, and disfigures a poem … this … has no place in the Lusiad.” Again, the objection has not been properly met and Camões' original scheme has been oversimplified. Finally, Mickle briefly refers to the “Pagan allegorical machinery” of La Henriade, arguing unjustly that Voltaire the poet fuses the two supernaturals, as in fact Camões does.

Thus Camões' genius had a clever and well-informed advocate in this English eighteenth-century man of letters, who, though committing himself to a few of the half-truths inevitable in all polemics, set aside almost all of Voltaire's arrogant and carping criticism. Mickle has something of the balance and the subtlety of Faria (there is no evidence that he drew directly on the latter's commentary, although he used his biography of the poet and often quotes Duperron, who repeats much of Faria's criticism). He may be said to represent English neoclassicism, which, when set against the French variety, is seen to be more liberal in its treatment of the imagination, to have a much less desiccated sensibility, and thus to stand at less distance from the fullness of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries of which Camões is such a commanding figure.

Naturally Mickle's generous apologia delighted Camões' compatriots, whose Gallophilia must have been greatly shocked by Voltaire's assessment of the “Portuguese Bible.” In his second edition of the Obras de Luis de Camões (Lisbon, 1782), Fr. Thomás Joseph de Aquino translates most of Mickle's scholarly introduction. He takes evident pleasure at the manner in which the Englishman exposes “o orgulho, soberba, ignorancia, e falsidade do turbulento e revoltoso Voltaire” (p. 60), and, quoting also French and Italian critics, joins in the pious baiting of the great outrager of beliefs.²¹ Echoes of Mickle appear as late as 1817 in the introduction to the famous early “scientific” edition of The Lusiads by the Morgado de Mateus, José Maria de Sousa Botelho, whose critical position is a mixture of patriotic opposition to Voltaire and to Boileau's precepts and a skeptical acceptance of Camões' machinery. A final echo of the soundness of Mickle's exposition is found in J. Aubertin's introduction to his English translation of 1878 (London). (It might be added that the literary war had produced a monograph in 1806, Araújo de Azevedo's Memória em defeza de Camões contra M. de la Harpe.)

The brave struggle of such worthy figures as Mickle against the prestige of Voltaire and what he stood for in literary criticism had its posthumous reward in the early nineteenth century, when romanticism, particularly in its vigorous German version, swept away the now moribund tyranny of French rationalism. The enthusiasm for the past and the cult of art as a national phenomenon were very favorable to the study and enjoyment of all forms of epic poetry. Where the Voltairean categories had subjected the restless life of The Lusiads to a Procrustean frame and thus devitalized it, the new romantic ideas welcomed the work and quickly placed it in the center of their group of significant European classics (which, by the way, included the works of Calderón and Shakespeare, both in their way victims, too, of the French eighteenth century).²² One can easily understand that this new school of European critical thought, which reacted as openly against the French eighteenth century as the latter had, in France, against the early seventeenth century, would admire in The Lusiads such daring as the choice of a new theme and a new kind of hero, in which Voltaire only saw something rather monstruous and loose. Possessed as they were of a fresh feeling for the epic and of the new revelation which we now know as the cult of history and the significant past, these romantics are largely responsible for our present appreciation of The Lusiads. What caught the imagination of critics like F. Schlegel was the varied symbolism of Camões' Venus and Bacchus, and the exciting role of Portugal as the herald of European world domination. This was the essence of The Lusiads for A. W. Schlegel and for Bouterwek and Sismondi, all of whom exalted the originality and unity of this fresh variation of the Virgilian scheme.²³ We can hardly be surprised that such a warm-hearted revival is lacking in the wisdom of Faria's humanism and tends to look naive beside even the rather bookish learning of Mickle. The eighteenth century killed a lot of our literary heritage, but the nineteenth discovered much that was unknown to the preceding age. The limited perception, however, of this rehabilitation of The Lusiads shows itself in the too emphatic acceptance of the symbolism of the gods. These romantics gave the figures of the ancient pantheon an evaluation that was inconsistent with their essentially fictional nature; their failure to subordinate and keep Venus, Jupiter, or Bacchus within the bounds of Christian belief and history inevitably produced a relationship of near equality between mythology and the true supernatural (here Mickle was on safer ground than the romantics, because the eighteenth century made a clearer distinction between poetry and philosophy).

By 1850 Camões and the epic in general had begun to give way to the cult of the new narrative form, the novel; but in England, France, Germany, and elsewhere, Camões criticism repeated and held on to the discoveries and dogmas of the great age of romanticism, while new translations (including five into English) increased the area of currency for the poem.²⁴

The last thirty years of the present century have witnessed a new and discriminating interest in the rhetoric and the imagery of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry, thus making it a propitious period for a reconsideration of The Lusiads. Apart from the constantly renewed act of faith which produces a stream of tributes from his fellow countrymen, Camões has been the subject of two recent studies which deserve special mention.

In the first (From Virgil to Milton, London, 1945), C. M. Bowra shows great sympathy for The Lusiads and undertakes an interpretation of the supernatural machinery which owes something to the canons of the nineteenth century: “Some might regard them [i.e., the gods] as devils or creations of the Devil. But the revival of learning had given them a new life” (p. 110). One of the chief endeavors of this scholar in his discussion of The Lusiads is to maintain the prestige of the pagan gods, and he is thus led to make such statements as: “the divinities stand for something not easily labelled but revealed in their actions” (p. 113), which is really a reflection of the romantic vision of Venus and Bacchus as symbolizing the clash of cultures. While it cannot be denied that “in his Pagan mythology Camões has found new symbols to display the real issues that he sees in Gama's voyage” (p. 114), a very latter-day conception of Renaissance man lies behind the contention that “their first claim on him is that after all they are the gods of his great love, the antique world” (p. 115); or, that “they are the forces which have created the best elements in European life as Camões knows it” (p. 116). To this last strange assertion he adds the confident conclusions:

In their own way and in their own place they are real. Camões believes in them and honours them. Free from the theological inhibitions of the Middle Ages and hardly touched by the Counter-Reformation, he works out his own way of bringing the Olympian gods into his poem [p. 116] … He equates Portugal both with Christianity and with the classical tradition. The Counter-Reformation and the Inquisition hardly touched him, and such small concessions as he made to them do not affect the character of his work.

[p. 138]²⁵

This is either to ignore or not to know the relevant evidence given earlier in this article; it is also to attribute to Camões an attitude towards pagan mythology and the ancient world that may be typical of European poets since the days of French Symbolism but is in no way characteristic of the age of Camões. Professor Bowra finds Camões' performance unacceptable at only one point, namely the poet's final presentation of the gods in Canto IX. This will be discussed below; suffice it to say here that such disagreement is quite consistent with the English critic's reading of the whole supernatural element in The Lusiads.

The second recent study is Hernâni Cidade's monograph, Luis de Camões, II (Lisbon, 1950), which gives a rather more balanced (because better informed) statement of Camões' use of pagan mythology. The Portuguese scholar begins with a reminder that for Camões and his contemporaries history had a special definition: “… este maravilhoso é o que se considerava intrínseco á historia, parte integrante da realidade que é a sua substância” (p. 99). But, as against this, he goes on to repeat the nineteenth-century contention that the Renaissance saw the resurrection of the pagan myth as an overriding aesthetic force (neither Cidade nor Bowra seems to be aware that the Renaissance gave new life to an old tradition of moralism in literature). Nevertheless, for Professor Cidade Camões' mythological machinery is at most an “artifício aformoseador,” and its problems can be discussed without throwing any serious doubt on the poet's final achievement, since it is Cidade's contention that the mythological is a layer which does not belong to the inner core of the poem, that is, to the voyage itself. In short, the mythological is used for the creation of rather ill-defined symbols and of the beautiful. It is not surprising, then, that Cidade should move along lines similar to those followed by Bowra, and that he should repeat the suggestion that the hand of the censor or the irony of the poet supplies the explanation of the “discrepancies” in the use of the supernatural. Thus, the pre-eminence of what we regard today as historical reality haunts this kind of criticism: Cidade cannot realize that The Lusiads is a full poetical and rhetorical vision (not version or transcript) of history. Although he underlines the importance of the sixteenth-century conception of history and attempts a subtler view of the subject than that given by the English critic, he never gets beyond a position of unsatisfactory skepticism:

Camões exprime por símbolos a sua visão filosófica do Mundo ou do Homem, mas o Poeta nem sempre é pensador, frequentemente se contentando de ser artista, ou seja, criador de formas de beleza ou imitador de outras que o deslumbram, por mero interesse lúdico.

[p. 112]

Something is taken from the romantic heritage, but is tempered with the modern “aesthetic” outlook which is in reality the heir of Voltairean formalism.

As two outstanding representatives of modern Camões criticism, both Bowra and Cidade suppose that the given totality of The Lusiads has been artificially achieved, or that Camões is guilty of an inconsistency which can, however, be disregarded without making any substantial difference to what is held to be the poem's unity.²⁶ A rather steep descent is thus marked since the intoxicated days of early romanticism; the progressive corrosive of realism has driven the symbolical into the unreal retreat of art for art's sake.

II

In this survey an attempt has been made to show that only one thorough explanation of the supernatural scheme of The Lusiads and its connection with the whole poem has ever been attempted. Camões criticism since that time has followed the checkered course of several schools and outlooks; but Faria has not been surpassed in his formidable undertaking to meet squarely and faithfully the critical problems presented by the roving fantasy of the poet. What follows is an attempt to suggest how a fuller comprehension of Camões' ingenuity than that contained in the latest studies may be reached, in the hope that a greater measure of acceptance may be granted where so much enthusiasm already exists.

The mythological material of The Lusiads can be divided thus: (1) the series of episodes dealing with the Heavenly Council and the various effects of the decisions taken here on the progress of Vasco da Gama's voyage, in Cantos I, II, and VI; (2) Adamastor, Canto V; (3) the Isle of Love, the banquet with the Nereids, the nymph's prophecy, and, finally, the revelations of Tethys, Cantos IX and X. A further analysis can be suggested: (a) the Heavenly Council and the preparations for the Isle of Love belong together on the same plane; (b) the interventions of Venus and Bacchus in man's affairs stand on a level of their own; (c) Adamastor's appearance to the Portuguese is of the same generic order as the episodes in Cantos IX and X, insofar as they all represent the actual meeting or coming together of men and supernatural beings; still, Adamastor and the Isle of Love also fall into (b) as interventions, while ultimately the poet creates yet another level of reality by declaring the episode of the Isle of Love to be pure allegory.

These analyses are enough to show that Camões' supernatural is of no simple kind but exists at different levels as it serves the requirements of this poetic voyage of discovery (thus is revealed the wisdom of Faria e Sousa in giving different explanations of a single personage as the occasion demanded). This fact in itself should warn against any easy interpretation of Camões' machinery. Moreover, the machinery is seen to be sufficiently dissimilar from (while it owes a lot to) its classical exemplars (chiefly Virgil's scheme) to make any close identification misleading. For instance, Vasco da Gama always prays and gives thanks to the Christian God, while His mercies are dispensed by Venus, who is unknown to Gama. Thus it may be seen that the poet indulges in an age-old division of the pagan pantheon and its subordination to the Christian Heaven and Hell,²⁷ further, the episodes in Cantos IX and X constitute a fusion of the human and the supernatural for which there is no clear parallel in ancient poetry with all its varied god-man relationship. It should, then, be at once clear that Camões has brought about a whole shift in the meaning and application of the mythological and has made it subserve a Christian theme. His mythology cannot be said to derive directly from classical antiquity. Camões's gods and goddesses move on three different planes: they exist in their unearthly abodes, they direct or intervene in the struggles of men, and they manifest themselves in recognizable human or humanized shape to the terror or pleasure of men. Also, these creatures invite two kinds of credence, that of the plastic and sensual literalness of the Venus-Jupiter scene and that of a clearly allegorical kind, as, for example, the supernatural direction of human history or the Adamastor episode. It will emerge from all this that to regard The Lusiads simply as symbolized history (as romantic criticism tended to do) would be to run the danger of setting up an unreal division within the one piece of poetry—on the one hand, historical facts versified (that is, dealt with through the humbler devices of metaphors and similes) and, on the other hand, the whole machinery that lifts the extrapoetic facts into the realm of the fantastic and the supernatural. It is surely juster to Camões to recognize, with Faria e Sousa, that the whole range of the performance—God, men, gods, symbols, allegories—is a poetic unity, and that his “history” is as rhetorical as his supernatural engines.

Camões introduces the supernatural in an entirely casual, “normal” manner:

Da branca escuma os mares se mostravam
Cobertos, onde as proas vão cortando
As marítimas águas consagradas,
Que do gado de Próteo são cortadas;
Quando os Deuses no Olimpo luminoso,
Onde o governo está da humana gente,
Se ajuntam em concílio glorioso …

(I, 19-20)

Thus it is an easy passage from the breezy realism of the first two lines to the classical metaphor and then to the Olympian region (which, for all its familiar Virgilian character, is soon to reveal itself in a new relationship to the Christian sentiments already expressed by the poet). So far we see nothing of the “superimposition” (as Professor Cidade calls it) of the divine plane on the human as if they were unconnected. There now follows, as every reader knows, a lengthy account (stanzas 21-41) of the Heavenly Council and of the argument, divisions, and decisions of the gods. This is all told with a felicitous use of flowing oratory and is made real by its lyrical and sensuous vigor. Nor does one really feel any sense of paradox or contradiction when Vasco da Gama makes an unequivocal confession of his Christian faith to the Sultan of Mozambique:

A lei tenho daquele cujo império
Obedece o visíbil e invisíbil,
Aquele que criou todo o Hemisfério …
Que padeceu desonra e vitupério,
E que do Céu à Terra emfim deceu,
Por subir os mortais da Terra ao Céu.

(I, 65)

for this is not the Vasco da Gama of history but of poetry; and he is as far from his extrapoetic counterpart as are the “velas” and “proas” of the poem from the ships which King Manoel's admiral commanded in 1498. The reader, further, should be no less willing to accept the scene of Bacchus appearing in the guise of an African Christian and kneeling before an altar to convince the Portuguese visitors to Mombasa that they are among friends. This is the poet's comment:

                                        … e assi por derradeiro
O falso Deus adora o verdadeiro;

(II, 12)

and this is how Faria e Sousa understands the double deception:

el demonio, representado en Baco, segun claramente hemos enseñado, se fingiò Christiano, tomando la forma de vn hombre, y poniendose delante de vn altar, como que le honrava; … supone agora el poeta que Christo acaba de airarse contra el … y le hace caer por tierra, y adorar el propio, lo que el no queria se adorasse de otro.

[Tomo I, cols. 384, 390]

Both Camões and Faria make no secret about Bacchus, who is not (as several critics would have it) simply the symbol of the hostile and uncivilized Orient, nor in this instance the subject of a “quaint fancy” (see Bowra, p. 112), but the Devil; and the identification is made all the more vivid by the deliberate allegorizing by means of personification of a very familiar figure from contemporary art and poetry. Bacchus, for a Christian poet, could exist on poetic African soil only as an incarnation of the Devil; that is, to make him “real” is to give him his doctrinally true character, just as in the Isle of Love Venus and her helpers when humanized must be declared theologically false and unreal.

The pattern, which has now departed some distance from Virgil, is further revealed when, as the unsuspecting Portuguese ships are about to sail into Mombasa and to their destruction, Venus, “a linda Ericina,”

                                                            … que guardando
Andava sempre a gente assinalada,
Vendo a cilada grande e tão secreta,
Voa do Céu ao mar como ũa seta.
Convoca as alvas filhas de Nereu,
Com toda a mais cerúlea companhia …
E, propondo-lhe a causa a que deceu,
Com todas juntamente se partia
Pera estorvar que a armada não chegasse
Aonde pera sempre se acadasse.

(II, 18-19)

Nereids and Tritons, with Venus presiding over the flagship, blow into the sails and put their shoulders to the sterns, and the fleet is saved when its course is changed at the last moment. Naturally, Vasco da Gama, perceiving the deceit of the Moslems, just as he is escaping from it, addresses his thanks to God:

Bem nos mostra a divina Providência
Destes portos a pouca segurança …
Ó tu, Guarda divina, tem cuidado
De quem sem ti não pode ser guardado!

(II, 31)

and Venus

Ouviu-lhe estas palavras piedosas
                                                            …, e comovida,
Dentre as Ninfas se vai …

(II, 33)

It is clearly not enough to allow this scene to pass with comments to the effect that “Venus is a sublime symbol, but she is still a goddess” (Bowra, p. 115), or that Camões portrays her “in the spirit of the Italian Renaissance” (ibid.). Cidade's comment is shrewder:

A deusa autora do favor que ele agradece à Divina Guarda é ainda quem lhe ouve a prece que à mesma Divina Guarda o herói dirige. Poderia supôr-se que, sob esta designação assim vaga, que tanto podia aplicar-se a Deus como a Vénus, o Poeta quisesse evitar que a contradição ideológica fosse pôsta em evidência pela diferença nominal. …

[op. cit., 103]

The Portuguese critic also says that “Camões viu o episódio, nítido, na imaginação” (p. 117), but he is aware of the need to see beneath the shining surface of the picture with all its intense plastic appeal. This is no ordinary mythological Venus, but a new Venus who is part of a scheme which includes God and man. One of the poet's historical sources is of direct help here: Castanheda, speaking of the incident, tells how Vasco da Gama, “Não querendo nosso Senhor que os nossos ahi acabassem como os mouros tinhão ordenado,” by a chance stopped his ships in time to avoid a reef and in this way the fleet turned about and sailed out.²⁸ There can be little doubt about the poet's meaning; God saved the Portuguese from disaster and Camões envisages Venus and her assistants as His agents, that is, as the poetic, rhetorical, expression of Providence. (A little later on, Canto II, 60-65, Jupiter sends down Mercury to warn Vasco da Gama, who once more thanks God for it.) The danger here as elsewhere is to take the literal layer of meaning as the only one or as the main one, whereas the whole mythological machinery exists as a colorful illustration or “adorno” of underlying Christion truth.²⁹ Camões, then, re-creates the historical facts by making Vasco da Gama an epic hero (as Mickle put it), attributing to him things he would or could have done. It makes little difference if the poet departs from or adheres to the detailed historical record; for he is telling another “history,” that of poetry, of which the pagan gods are just as much a part as they are no part of extrapoetic history. That is to say, these gods in actual history can only be false gods or the Devil; they have, however, another meaning within poetry, and Camões has given them a high place in his symbols by making them serve the Christian supernatural. If one remembers, then, that poetic truth is only part of the greater truth, one will also see that the former cannot be identified with the latter but rather is a special aspect of it. This is surely what our poet meant at the outset when he said:

Ouvi, que não vereis com vãs façanhas,
Fantásticas, fingidas, mentirosas,
Louvar os vossos, como nas estranhas
Musas …

(I, 11)

Camões, however elusive his mythological scheme may at times appear, can have been in no doubt as to what he intended it to mean. The gods for him belong to truth only insofar as they have certain poetic meanings; otherwise they are empty fictions, pagan and diabolical.

Venus no sooner rescues her beloved Portuguese at Mombasa than she betakes herself to the presence of Jupiter, where there occurs a scene of the utmost verbal evocativeness (it should be recalled that it suffered from expurgation in the “Piscos” edition of 1584). This passage, if taken literally (that is, in isolation), must for all its shimmering beauty be described as a scene of marked voluptuousness with decided touches of lubricity (especially in Canto II, 37). Here we are back on Olympus, that is, for the moment in an apparently closed pagan world, and again Camões exerts his great lyrical charm and is likely to make the reader momentarily forget the interlocking supernatural scheme he is in the process of unfolding. A review of the rise and fall of comment on this famous passage reveals the changing viewpoints of Camões criticism and throws some fresh light on the use of the supernatural in The Lusiads.

Faria e Sousa, with the authority of the Song of Songs behind him, and his belief that the whole poem should be understood as serious and uplifting verse, consistently allegorizes every detail and rejects the suggestion that the scene is immodest. The nakedness of Venus before Jupiter is an admirable device because “el poeta quiso mostrar que nuestra religion es clara” (Tomo I, col. 424) and, also, we stand naked before God. Venus can also be taken for the Virgin or the Spouse, that is, the Church or Religion (since for Faria Jupiter here stands for Christ, and any other interpretation is absurd). At this point, however, Faria begins to show a certain uneasiness about the textual evidence: “confessamos que el Poeta mezclò (pero con inimitable destreza) alguna cosa de los humanos para inclinar al gusto de los que leen …” (col. 431); but he proceeds bravely to allegorize Venus's limbs (“los valientes martires i doctores que … se llaman columnas de la religion”), and even more intimate parts of her body. A slight doubt remains concerning the propriety in “un poeta circunspecto y Catholico” of such frank detail. But the commentator again decides in favor of the poet, who, he says, avoids communicating the mysteries too easily to the vulgar eye: “los grandes hombres estan licenciados por la ciencia (singularmente Poetica …) para vsar de cualquier atreuimiento, como no sea contra la Fe …” (cols. 436-437). Venus, he concludes, is guiltless as represented since she stands for Faith and not the pagan goddess who cuckolded Jupiter. (Faria does for this passage what generations of commentators had been doing for the Metamorphoses with their Ovides moralisés).

Attention has already been drawn to Voltaire's judgment of the allegorical interpretation and his treatment of Camões' supernatural in general, attitudes for which he would find justification among the writings of such preceptists as Rapin. The latter (as Voltaire was to do later) refused to accept Tasso's allegory of the Liberata and regarded this interpretation as a “chimaera” (see edition cited in note 11, II, 164).

A fitting gloss on Faria's exposition is, however, provided by Mickle, who quotes in translation the statement of Duperron et Castera on the scene:

I am aware of the objection, that this passage is by no means applicable to the celestial Venus. I answer once for all, that the names and adventures of the Pagan divinities are so blended and uncertain in mythology, that a poet is at great liberty to adapt them to his allegory as he pleases. Even the fables, which, to those who penetrate no deeper than the rind, may appear as profane, even these contain historical, physical, and moral truths, which fully atone for the seeming licentiousness of the letter. …

[Chalmers, op.cit., XXI, 645, note 10]

Mickle himself then has this to say: “The poet's assertion, and the taste of the age in which he wrote, sufficiently vindicate the endeavor to unravel and explain the allegory of the Lusiad” (ibid., note 12). Duperron reflects Faria, while Mickle has enough understanding and imagination to see the usefulness, even the necessity, of reading poetry in more ways than one. These quotations offer an explanation where Faria e Sousa brooked no questioning. The Portuguese commentator at times chose to allegorize where the allegory need not be applied to every detail. The virtue of the figurative interpretation is that several alternatives may be available; the weakness of the method is the failure to realize that the literal need not have a full or exact correspondence with the figurative sense in every case. Camões' poem is a rich field for the allegorist; one is not so much struck by the ingenuity of Faria in tackling it as by the large measure of consistency and coherence made possible by the actual poetic text.

What was for Faria an example of rhetorical exaggeration became for generations with other definitions of poetry something either unacceptable in its totality or in certain ways inexplicable. The romantics, however, do not appear to have been unduly worried by such passages as the one here under discussion (although they were aware of the problem involved); according to critics like F. Schlegel, Camões was merely exercising his birthright as a Renaissance man in drawing on the rich emotive and symbolical qualities of such a figure as Venus.³⁰

Little change of emphasis seems to have taken place in the last one hundred years, for Professor Bowra is satisfied with the following explanation:

The protectress of Portugal is still the goddess of love and beauty, and the poet is proud that his country should be favoured by her. So when she visits Jupiter …, Camões is more daring even than the Roman poets in making her display her naked beauty without any false shame. …

[p. 115]

This passage is followed by the first of the two conclusions quoted above (p. 107). For Professor Cidade the scene has a similar significance: “Nestes episódios o Poeta é sobretudo artista, preocupado de arranjo de acção fantástica e de beleza …” (p. 115).

It can be held that the interpretation of this passage initiated by Faria is not essential to any real understanding of The Lusiads, and that the position of Bowra and Cidade allows for a generous appreciation of Camões' plastic imagery and his symbolism, while at the same time the reader is not tied to a close correspondence of symbol and symbolized. One sympathizes and shares the modern enjoyment of the enchanting vividness of such a scene as the one between Venus and Jupiter. One must still, however, attempt to relate it to whatever comprehensive symbols one believes to belong to the poem (and the uncommented Lusiads demands that its level of meaning be sought). When this is done, it will be seen that Venus is no longer the pagan goddess in all her poetic literalness, but that she must, on all the evidence, be given a decidedly figurative interpretation.

The Adamastor episode is included among the passages chosen for discussion here because it has always been hailed as one of the poet's greatest achievements, and because its very straightforwardness serves as an admonition not to use it as a yardstick for the whole supernatural scheme. The poet could hardly have presented his monstruous creature with greater clarity:

Eu sou aquele oculto e grande Cabo
A quem chamais vós outros Tormentório …
Aqui toda a africana costa acabo
Neste meu nunca visto promontório,
Que pera o Pólo Antártico se estende,
A quem vossa ousadia tanto ofende;

(V, 50)

this declaration, when coupled with his ancestry, gives him at once complete and convincing stature:

Fui dos filhos aspérrimos da Terra,
Qual Encélado, Egeu e o Cantimano;
Chamei-me Adamastor, e fui na guerra
Contra o que vibra os raios de Vulcano.

(V, 51)

All the proposed literary parallels and sources (e.g., the River Xanthus, Polyphemus, and Atlas) can do little but invest this creation with superfluous and superficial pedigrees, for in Adamastor we have a triumphant justification of Camões' use of mythology.

Faria e Sousa musters his erudition (including some “philological” identification of Adamastor and Mahomet), but he merely underlines (and at times blurs) the original clarity of the text. Adamastor, he says, stands for the Cape, since all the giants were sons of Earth. Voltaire's praise is sparing but pointed: “Cela est grand en tout pays sans doute.” Duperron, as elsewhere, follows Faria and makes much of Adamastor as the personification of Mohammedanism. Mickle endorses this reading but will not go along with Duperron in seeing in the monster “an exact description” of the Prophet himself. For the Englishman “the fiction of the apparition of the Cape of Tempests, in sublimity and awful grandeur of imagination, stands unsurpassed in human composition” (Chalmers, op.cit., p. 682, note 19), bowing only before Job's description of the descent of the Angel of the Lord or St. John's apocalyptic vision. Bowra and Cidade, each in his own terms, do little more than restate this unanimity of opinion:

Adamastor is convincing because he is related to fact and because his forecasts belong to history … Just as Bacchus symbolises the difficulties which the Portuguese meet on their journey to the East, so Adamastor symbolises a natural obstacle, the passage round the Cape of Storms, the point where East meets West and disasters are common. …

[pp. 124-125]

Amassar num mito formidoloso estas sombras trágicas de fatalidade, pôr em voz horrenda, com ameaçadoras profecias, ásperas palavras que ressoassem como tormentas desencadeadas, eis a concepção poética. …

[p. 124]

Camões has conceived Adamastor as a pure personification which, because it is irreducible and can withstand other figurative accretions, remains unchangeable for all generations. As stated above, Adamastor also “meets” men, as Tethys and her nymphs do later, but he exists in “history” in a way impossible for them. Adamastor allegorizes simply as Evil in some form and does not require to be allegorized away.

Finally, there is the most discussed of all Camões' mythological scenes, the Isle of Love, the subsequent banquet, and the prophecies in Cantos IX and X. A short synopsis may be useful at this point:

Venus decides to reward her Portuguese navigators as they are on their way back from Calicut through the Indian Ocean. Enlisting the aid of Cupid, who uses his arrows to good effect, she succeeds in arousing desire in the goddess Tethys and the Nereids (Venus herself was sprung from the sea), and they are conducted to an island of paradisiacal delights and beauty. Hither the Portuguese are directed and here they land to enjoy the fruits of their labors (Vasco da Gama has Tethys and each sailor his corresponding nymph). The poet then explains, in an important passage (IX, 89-95), that this scene is an allegory of reward and fame. There follows the magnificent banquet of the humans and their sea nymphs, after which, one of them, instructed by Proteus, foretells the glories of the Portuguese empire in India. Later Tethys herself leads her lover Gama to the highest point of the island. Here she explains that “a grande máquina do mundo” is the work of the great God, and that she, Saturn, Juno, Jupiter, and Janus are mere fictions of man made only “pera fazer versos deleitosos,” and that Jupiter is to be taken here to stand for Providence (X, 80-83). Tethys then proceeds to show Vasco da Gama the wonders of the (Ptolemaic) universe, and unfolds the continents of Africa and Asia where the Portuguese will win fame; the martyrdom of St. Thomas the Apostle and Camões' own shipwreck on the River Mekong are among the events described. The Portuguese then depart from the Isle of Love and proceed on their journey home.

As with the episode of Adamastor, the poet here reminds the reader of many classical and other parallels (for example, Calypso's island, Alcinous' garden, Virgil's Elysium, Alcina's abode); but, as before, the absorption is complete and comparisons really serve to bring out Camões' originality. The scene from Canto IX recalls that of the meeting of Venus and Jupiter for its plasticity and sensuousness of detail; the Isle of Love has also occasioned differing interpretations and has been the subject of praise and blame.

A sharp division of opinion as to the meaning and propriety of the Isle of Love is seen from the very beginning. In the expurgated “Piscos” edition whole stanzas were omitted. Faria e Sousa, as might be expected, defends the passage against objectors:

nuestro poeta, pareciendo que se engolfa en lascivias por todo este canto, mandandonos, que sepamos quitar el velo a su profundo disponer, y enseñar, viene a ofrecernos convertida en gloria verdadera toda esa invencion con que nos lleva por esta deliciosa isla.

[Tomo IV, col. 23]

Cupid must, he insists, be seen here as “divino Cupido,” just as the Venus of The Lusiads is the higher not the lower one. Finally, when the love-making is over and Camões makes his declaration in IX, 89, Faria feels jubilant justification for his general interpretation:

viendo el poeta que podian dudar algunos de que el introduxesse estas ninfas i aparentes delicias en sentido alegorico, le pareció declararse tanto, como aqui lo hace; diciendo que las Ninfas, i la Tetis, y la Venus, y la isla descritas, todo es fingido, y que no significa mas de la Fama, y gloria con que las Virtudes o Valor heroico que nuestros navegantes amaron i exercieron, los vinieron a aplaudir … Luego la alegoria que desde el principio deste poema seguimos, no es fantasia nuestra. …

[Tomo IV, col. 268]

The complete contrast to this attitude presented by French classical opinion can here be registered, since Voltaire chose to comment on this passage:

Camoëns … s'avise d'informer le lecteur que toute cette fiction ne signifie autre chose que le plaisir qu'un honnête homme sent à faire son devoir. Mais il faut avouer qu'une ile enchantée dont Vénus est la déesse, et où des nymphes caressent des matelots après un voyage de long cours, ressemble plus à un musico d'Amsterdam qu'à quelque chose d'honnête …

Clearly, Camões' accomplishment (as most probably in other episodes of the poem) is entirely lost on Voltaire, whom the poet has failed to convince. His basic comparison and accusation of immodesty implies an insincerity of intention on the part of the poet.

At no point of his commentary does Mickle spring so fiercely to the defense of Camões as when writing of the Isle of Love. Voltaire, himself the creator of a Temple of Love in La Henriade, IX, writes in ignorance, his accusations being “the arrogant assertions of the most superficial acquaintance with his works, a hearsay, echoed from critic to critic”; other modern poets have used similar scenes, yet Camões “has given less offence to true criticism”; the behavior of Camões' nymphs “is that of the virgin who hopes to be the spouse,” and “the nuptial sanctity draws its hallowed curtains, and a masterly allegory shuts up the love-scenes of Camoens.” The good Mickle, with all his erudition and tolerant definitions of poetry, displays in his defense of Camões' sensuousness a naïveté unknown to Faria, whose work is characterized by a far freer sense of relationships. (Mickle, in translating this and other mythological scenes, gives a characteristically eighteenth-century gloss to Camões' sensuous details.)

Mickle's well-argued case again met response as late as 1817 from the Morgado de Matheus, who continued to perceive the delicacy and the value of the allegory. What caused dispute in the later nineteenth century, however, was the problem involved in the ready acceptance of the Isle without the figurative meaning attached to it. Thus, Sir Richard Burton, in his famous Commentary on the poem (1881), reflects a contemporary interest in locating the real geographical model for the Isle of Love. A modern critical trend of more relevance to this article casts doubt on the poet's declarations in Cantos IX and X; such passages to the modern reader, who believes that pagan myths have, in poetry, an inalienable value and significance, are tantamount to a surrender of the whole illusion.³¹ We are back again to the conflict between the older and the modern meanings of symbolism, except that in this present case the problem is solved by rejecting the offending stanzas and attributing them to outside influence. Such contentions would appear to be lacking in any real evidence, but they still find support. Thus Professor Bowra thinks Camões “inconsistent” in giving his two explanations in the last two cantos. Stanza 91, Canto IX, he finds “worse than an anticlimax; if we treat it seriously, it spoils much of the poem” (p. 117). The censor's intervention is again suggested, and we are told that the poet's explanation “should not be treated as his last word”; on the other hand, if, as Camões says in X, 83,

Jupiter is Divine Providence and God works through second causes, Camões's gods and goddesses are neither fictions nor allegories nor famous men and women of the past but celestial powers who … carry out the commands and will of the Supreme Being.

[Bowra, p. 119]

Later on, Bowra reflects on the unsatisfactory nature of the Isle of Love itself:

the poem moves in a world of pure imagination where ethical distinctions count for little … His allegory is not entirely convincing … It is the price he has to pay for allowing his heroic poem to contain a theme which belonged to the different world of chivalrous epic.

[p. 130]

It is interesting to note that this modern criticism is up to a point in agreement with Voltaire's views, except that such moderns as Professor Bowra accept the mythological scene as in some sense valid for them. In other words, the romantic belief in the general symbolism of the poem still holds good but is accompanied by some of the earlier skepticism about allegorism.³² The English critic's position derives logically from the assumption that Camões grants a place of honor to the gods and goddesses consistent with what a humanist's love of antiquity is supposed to have been. Any suggestion, therefore, that the creatures of mythology are less than divine can only be answered by excluding that part of the textual evidence that contradicts this general reading of the poem.

As before, an alternative explanation, deriving from the comprehensive exposition of Faria e Sousa, suggests itself. For the first time, in Cantos IX and X, Vasco da Gama and his sailors meet with supernatural creatures of flesh and blood. Some new explanation therefore is called for to make this situation fit into the mythological pattern of the rest of the poem. It would seem that Camões at this point had reached the limit of his inventiveness and could save the situation only by having recourse to pure allegory. By declaring that Tethys and the Nereids are nothing but fictions, Camões puts a strain on the understanding, since he is also reducing or changing the reality of his historical figures by associating them with personifications of Reward and Fame. His allegory, nevertheless, does keep this whole scene attached (if with a certain tenuousness) to the main body of the poem, and the figurative or doctrinal reading of the whole poem remains uniform. One can feel disappointed, with Bowra, at the inconsistency between the adequacy of the scene in itself and for itself, on the one hand, and the poet's necessity to keep his overrich fantasy within certain outer rational bonds. It can also be contended that such mythological material has no proper place in an epos (and this is a strong argument); but, if the scenes must be inserted, then the mythological creatures can only be what their fellows are in the rest of the poem. In fact, the gods and goddesses could have no other meaning in The Lusiads than that which they are granted when Tethys says:

… eu, Saturno e Jano,
Júpiter e Juno, fomos fabulosos,
Fingidos de mortal e cego engano.
Só pera fazer versos deleitosos
Servimos.

(X, 82)

because, in the heaven of which she speaks,

Aqui, só verdadeiros, gloriosos
Divos estão …

(Ibid.)

An ending that would in some felicitous way draw the different planes together was probably required in such a curiously mixed work as The Lusiads. A humanism that can accept a blend of the epic and the allegorical will find in the Isle of Love a solution that is particularly appropriate (for Mickle it is an ending of outstanding merit), although it can be argued that Camões' consistency to the body of belief that animated his mythological creatures has done some violence to the structural subtleties of his main theme. On the other hand, a classicism which clings to the Virgilian narrative as a norm will find these closing scenes in The Lusiads both unassimilable and inharmonious. Here we have in a nutshell the critical problem of Camões's great poem.

CONCLUSION

The Lusiads is a work of sufficient grandeur of scheme and subtlety and suppleness of treatment to satisfy readers holding various conceptions of poetry and of its function. Indeed, the critical history of the work can be said to be in microcosm that of the development (or degeneration) of European sensibility over the last four hundred years. The totality of the poem has suffered alike from the contractions and expansions of successive generations of taste. It must, however, be stressed that there is an orthodoxy of interpretation, and that this can best be found in the commentary of Faria e Sousa, who had such an exalted opinion of the poet's achievement that he granted it all the acceptance necessary to explain it in its entirety.

That Faria e Sousa has been neglected cannot be denied. The corollary of this is that he presents a view of poetry that may not at first be acceptable to us. It is necessary to speak of allegory as well as of symbol to understand Camões' intention, although both Faria and his followers may use the term “allegory” in the imprecise humanistic sense which covers most forms of figurative meaning.³³ From this it follows that the Aeneid alone is not a sufficient model by which to judge the pattern of The Lusiads, since Camões does not simply take over the mythological scheme but, in the manner of his contemporaries, makes the ancient pantheon acquire a new meaning. Thus, the pagan gods are personifications, with allegorical traits, of forces at work between God and men; and it is only when men come face to face with the creatures of myth that their meaning in poetry (i.e., fictions) and in life (i.e., false gods) must be made explicit. To submit the gods and goddesses to this new reduction of their original poetic meaning does not in any serious way deprive them of their familiar appeal. It merely calls for a new focusing of the view of the epos and of its traditional elements.

Camões, following the example of Lucan, has drawn on recent history, but he has then proceeded to make it co-exist with his new allegorical or symbolical myth, backed by the Christian supernatural.³⁴ Given the Christian concept of human history, any non-Christian supernatural can only find a place in the scheme of things as a serving and subordinate element, not in its own right. Thus, Christian history is allegorized with the help of the pagan gods (as the censor of 1572 saw clearly); these gods, for the moment, take on an honorary and, with the exception of Bacchus, an honorable role as the rhetorical expressions of Providence, the forces of Christian virtue and endeavor. By thus “Christianizing” it, Renaissance man rescued pagan mythology from the condemnation of his doctrinal beliefs.

To do full justice to Camões and to ourselves, it should be added that the passage of four centuries has caused changes in the understanding of concepts common to both Camões and ourselves. It should be emphasized that certain attitudes of the sixteenth-century mind are strange to us if not beyond our comprehension. To this extent our appreciation of a poem like The Lusiads will be limited. While it is not fruitful to cast blame (Camões has more than once been the victim of his critics), it has to be conceded, in all fairness, that the poet himself sinned on the side of surrender to the urgent dictates of his imagination. In spite of his advocates, one cannot completely set aside the adverse criticism of some of his richer fantasies. A poet of his vigor and originality was bound to present problems even for his own age. There is, then, a certain logic connecting the thought of the censors of 1584, Fr. Rapin, Voltaire, and even Bowra, who felt defrauded when told by Camões that he must allegorize what for Bowra was a scene sufficient to itself. Camões, who speaks of the “engano” associated with the gods, may be said to practice it himself on his devoted readers. His skill and inspiration are, however, of such an order that he continues to win and hold different kinds of people in his spell. As long as the epos has a meaning for the serious student of poetry, so long will The Lusiads require close attention.³⁵

Notes

1. For example, W. C. Atkinson, in the introduction to his recent translation of The Lusiads (London, 1952), refers to “an inherent contradiction in the conception, of which the poet was himself as well aware as the most carping of his critics” (p. 22). The latter part of this statement is highly disputable.

2. The blending of the pagan and the Christian was, however, not uncommon in other forms of poetry; mention can be made of Gil Vicente's play, Cortes de Júpiter, as one example, while Sannazaro's De partu Virginis is a famous case in another kind of narrative verse.

3. Reprinted in Camões' Obras completas (Lisbon, 1947) (Clássicos Sá da Costa), Preface and notes by H. Cidade, IV, lv. This is the edition cited in this article.

4. Ibid., p. xx.

5. Ibid., pp. xx-xxiv.

6. Ibid., pp. xxiv-xxvi.

7. It is necessary to stress this last point in view of the distorted postromantic view of the literary Renaissance and its frequent application to Camões.

8. The extent to which Faria e Sousa was reflecting and continuing the sixteenth-century theories of moralism and allegorism may be appreciated in the now standard work of Jean Seznec, La Survivance des dieux antiques: Essai sur le rôle de la tradition mythologique dans l'humanisme et dans l'art de la Renaissance (London, 1940), especially pp. 75-108, and 223-245.

9. See my two articles in Bull. Hisp., LI, 381-406, LII, 191-228, in which I have examined allegorical comment on Balbuena's El Bernardo and its Italian models.

10. Faria was in point of fact one of the last of a generation of humanists who brought their learning and enthusiasm to such modern classics as Ariosto and Tasso (see the first of the two articles mentioned in note 9). It should also be recalled that the defense of Camões called forth João Soares de Brito's Apologia (1641).

11. The edition used is the collected Réflexions (Amsterdam, 1686), II, 162, 173, 179.

12. There is a pleasing irony in Afrânio Peixoto's remark: “O divertido, insisto, é que o Santo Ofício, pela religião, seja liberal, e o anatema venha da Estética, pelo pio Voltaire …,” Ensaios camonianos (Coimbra, 1932), p. 28.

13. See Voltaire's letter of Oct. 2, 1776 to De Vaines: “… Cependant je reçois le Camoëns de M. de la Harpe … Je crois que c'est à vos bontés que je dois ce Camoëns et je vous en remercie, quoique je ne le crois pas tout à fait digne d'avoir été traduit de M. de La Harpe.” The letter of Oct. 18, also to De Vaines, is even more revealing: “Je vous remercie du Camoëns; je ne l'avais jamais lu tout entier, et je crois encore que peu de gens le liront tout entier.” Text in Œuvres complètes de Voltaire (Paris, 1882), vol. L. La Harpe's translation appeared in the same year of 1776; in it Voltaire's criticism of The Lusiads is defended.

14. Voltaire, in his Essai, had also found Tasso's Allegoria universale, which he wrote for the Liberata, “incompréhensible.”

15. “Les Portugais, naviguant sur l'océan Atlantique, découvrirent la pointe la plus méridionale de l'Afrique: ils virent une vaste mer; elle les porta aux Indes orientales. Leurs périls sur cette mer, et la découverte de Mozambique, de Mélinde et de Calicut, ont été chantés par le Camoëns, dont le poème fait sentir quelque chose des charmes de l'Odysée et de la magnificence de l' Encide.” Esprit des Lois, Bk. XXI, Ch. xxi.

16. There are those of Duperron et Castera and La Harpe already mentioned and in English that of W. J. Mickle.

17. Mickle and Faria e Sousa were linked by the Morgado de Matheus (1817) for their erudite contributions to the study of The Lusiads. Apart from the Introduction and the extensive notes to the text, Mickle's Lusiad [sic] was preceded by essays on “The History of the Discovery of India,” “History of the Portuguese Empire in Asia,” “The Life of Camoens,” “Dissertation on the Lusiad and Observations upon Epic Poetry,” and an appendix from the Portuguese archives. This formidable presentation recalls the similar tributes to the Orlando Furioso in the sixteenth century. The edition of Mickle's work used for this article is that contained in Alexander Chalmers' The Works of the English Poets from Chaucer to Cowper (London, 1810), vol. XXI.

18. Mickle has this to say: “And never, perhaps, was there such a random reverie, such a mass of misrepresentations and falsities as the whole of it [Voltaire's original essay, in English, 1726] exhibits. The most excuseable parts of it are superficial in the highest degree …” (Chalmers, XXI, 606, note 1). “Besides, whatever has the sanction of the celebrated name of Voltaire will be remembered and, unless circumstantially refuted, may one time, perhaps, be appealed to, as decisive, in the controversies of literary merit” (ibid., p. 617).

19. See Mickle's statement to this effect in Chalmers, XXI, 610.

20. This and the following quotations from Mickle's “Dissertation” are found in Chalmers, XXI, 611-619.

21. Fr. de Aquino had already in his first edition of the Obras singled out Voltaire for this judgment: “Foi Mr. de Voltaire hum homen summamente soberbo, cheio de vaidade, e que mal enfarinhado, ou para melhor dizer, com huma leve tintura das materias, e das Faculdades, orgulhosamente pretendeo no seu tempo passar pelo maior Critico, e por hum dos homens mais eruditos da Europa.” “Discurso preliminar,” reprinted in the second edition, p. 81.

22. Use has been made here of Harri Meier's informative essay “Os Lusiadas no romantismo alemão,” in his Ensaios de filologia românica (Lisbon, 1948), pp. 207-226.

23. Ibid, pp. 223-225. For individual writers, see, for example, F. Schlegel's Nachricht von einigen seltneren italienischen und spanischen Dichterwerken, nebst einer Charakteristik des Camoens … (1803), and his Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur (1815), Lecture XI; A. W. Schlegel's Berliner Vorlesungen über schöne Literatur und Kunst (1801-04); J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi's De la littérature du midi de l'Europe (1813), Chaps. 37 and 38.

24. Wilhelm Storck (Vida e obras de Luis de Camões, Lisbon, 1897, p. 694) reflects a common nineteenth-century viewpoint: “Este dualismo entre o maravilhoso cristão e o gentílico não feria nem escandalizava de modo algum no século XVI, em plena renascença da antiguidade greco-romana, os espíritos meio pagãos da parte culta da sociedade …” Teófilo Braga (Camões: A obra lírica e épica, Oporto, 1911) echoes earlier opinion: “Pela sua vasta cultura humanista, Camões conheceu todas estas lendas alexandrinas …, em que se exprimia a expansão da cultura ocidental. Quando à empresa de Alexandre, cujas glórias os Romanos assimilaram aos seus triunfos, sucedia a acção vitoriosa dos Portugueses, que outro símbolo mais significativo da continuidade histórica poderia encontrar Camões para representá-la artísticamente?” Quoted by Cidade, Luis de Camões, II, 115. Afrânio Peixoto, as late as 1924, is repeating the ideas of Da. Carolina Michaëlis: “Camões, sôbre ser homem do Renascimento ou retorno ás fontes pagãs do Helenismo, emancipação da humanidade devota na humanidade do livre exame, e, portanto, complexiva de todos os conhecimentos e motivos de arte, tinha precisamente um tema cujo trato exigia as reminiscências pagãs” (see his Ensaios camonianos, p. 24).

25. The same attitude (with special reference to the passages in Cantos IX and X dealt with later in this article) was adopted by the late A. F. G. Bell in Luis de Camões (Oxford, 1923), p. 91.

26. A very reasonable rebuttal of the thesis that Camões's poem had been interfered with by the Inquisition or that he held views that could meet with its disapproval is given by A. E. da Silva Dias in his admirable edition of The Lusiads (Lisbon, 1916), pp. xxi-xxiii.

27. I have attempted to trace the history of this syncretism, as it relates to the elaboration of Hojeda's La Christiada, in an article in Estudios dedicados a R. Menéndez Pidal, IV (Madrid, 1953), 469-508.

28. Quoted by E. A. da Silva Dias in his note to II, 24.

29. Faria e Sousa, for whom Venus and the Nereids here stand for Christian Faith and the Virtues, respectively, makes this comment on the escape of the Portuguese: “el poeta por mostrar que lo era, lo refiere como milagro poeticamente, fingiendo que la Religion y los Angeles acudieron a librar los navegantes y por exagerarlo lo disfraça con Venus i las Nereydas, por mostrar con la mezcla de las fabulas que fue aquel suceso una verdad no verisimil; una cosa estupenda i un favor divino raro” (Tomo I, col. 412). A modern reader may not find it easy to allegorize all the details in this way; it might help to draw attention to the prevalence of allegory in contemporary painting, such as in the canvases of Titian, “Allegory of the Battle of Lepanto” and “Allegory of Religion Succored by Spain,” and Rubens' “The Triumph of the Eucharist.” Faria indicates at various places that he had such a comparison with the plastic arts in mind; it is surely more logical to go in the direction of allegory than to give a significance to mythological details that will grant an independence to Venus which she cannot possibly possess in the poem. The modern reader will also find Mickle's and Duperron's remarks on this passage a halfway house to Faria (see Chalmers, XXI, 642, notes 4 and 5). The “fermosa Dione” of II, 33 is translated by Mickle as “celestial Love.”

30. See F. Schlegel, Nachricht von einigen seltneren italienischen und spanischen Dichterwerken, nebst einer Characteristik des Camoens, and H. Meier, op. cit., p. 224.

31. The question as to whether the censor's hand may be seen in these passages was discussed as far back as Francisco M. Leoni's monograph Camões e ‘Os Lusiadas’ (Lisbon, 1872) (for which see H. Cidade, op. cit. p. 103). A very recent statement of the case against the censor, B. Ferreira, and his supposed intervention is contained in two essays in Camões, Camilo, Eça e alguns mais, 4th. ed. (Lisbon, 1949), pp. 11-35, by the novelist Aquilino Ribeiro, who argues eloquently but unconvincingly that the passages in Cantos IX and X are untypical and, therefore, cannot be a true part of the whole inspiration and spirit of the poem. Such a view, which is based upon a definition of the poetic Renaissance as something “pagan,” is entirely out of sympathy with any serious explanation of allegory as involving the syncretism of pagan and Christian terms and symbols. A. F. G. Bell's contribution has already been mentioned (note 25 above). It should be added, as against these critics, that both Sir Richard Burton and Afrânio Peixoto (op. cit., pp. 28-31) are among those who have accepted the textual evidence as valid. See also note 26 above.

32. H. Cidade, op. cit., p. 109, questions Bowra's thesis and suggests something more reminiscent of Faria's position: “nos não custa admitir que haja o Poeta, por espontânea iniciativa, sacrificado o mito à lição moral ou á verdade científica, quando reconheceu que se opunham”—that is to say, that Camões adopted the mediaeval attitude toward myth which derived from Euhemerus' “historical” theory. See also p. 105, and Cidade's note to IX, 91-92, in Vol. V of the Obras (Lisbon, 1947). This explanation is, of course, no new thing (see, e.g., E. A. da Silva Dias, who makes the same comment on X, 82).

33. This is one of the main points discussed in my articles mentioned in note 9 above.

34. Camões, however, avoids the mistake of Tasso in too closely identifying the deeds of the crusaders with God's will as expressed in his explicitly Christian supernatural. The interposition of the pagan mythological scheme thus has its multiple purposes. In this way it was possible to preserve the form of the ancient epos; otherwise the only solution was the poema sacro (see addendum to my article referred to in note 27 above).

35. My best thanks are due to my former colleague T. E. May for taking notes for me from the copy of Faria e Sousa's commentary in the B. N. Madrid, and to the Sheffield University Research Fund for its financial help. I wish also to thank T. P. Waldron (Manchester) for his kindness in lending me some works by Peixoto and Cidade used in this article.