SOURCE: “What Did the Old Man of Restelo Mean?” in Luso-Brazilian Review, Vol. 17, No. 2, Winter 1980, pp. 139-51.

[In this essay, Moser outlines the variety of interpretations of the speech of the old man of Restelo at the close of Canto IV of The Lusiads, observing: “Every intellectual who has reflected on the episode of the Old Man has seen it in the light of his own times and circumstances.”]

THE EPISODE

In his Lusiads, Camões took great care to enhance the historical truth—as verdades—which he chose as his subject. By superimposing a plot of apparently pagan gods upon real events, he elevated as well as complicated the meaning of his poem. A second device he used with the same intent was the insertion of symbolic episodes, of his own invention, three of which have always fascinated his readers: the episode of the titan Adamastor, the episode of the Isle of Love, and the episode of the Old Man who stood on the bank of the Tagus river—more precisely, on the Restelo beach near the Belém church, in a western suburb of Lisbon. There we are made to see him facing Vasco da Gama and his three ships about to sail for India on July 8, 1497. The address given by the Old Man “of venerable mien”—de aspeito venerando—carries a clear message. He asks the mariners to abandon the voyage. An apparent paradox results. What is this accusing voice doing in a work written to celebrate this very voyage as an immortal heroic feat of the persistent Portuguese? The contradictory speech, the culmination of Canto IV, is reported in the Old Man's own words by Gama himself to a hospitable African prince. It has challenged its readers' intelligence more than any other passage in the poem. How to interpret it? Through the centuries, some of the best minds in Portugal have offered different opinions, each of them convinced that his was the correct one. Their astonishing diversity will be seen in the following pages. But before that, a brief evocation of the episode and its antecedents is necessary to set the stage.

The speech of the Old Man on the Restelo follows and highlights a detailed account of the solemn, increasingly emotional send-off that was given to the fleet by a crowd of Lisbonese, among whom two women stand out, one a mother, the other a wife. They express their fear about the fate of their beloved—o temoroso amor—to the accompaniment of pitiful wailing and crying coming from old people and children—os velhos e os meninos. Unnamed like the rest, the Old Man who stands in their midst—entre a gente—then speaks up, with a heavy heart—a voz pesada. Being old, his mind and heart are filled with recollections of past events. He addresses all of the men on the ships, from Gama on down—nós no mar. First he condemns the lust for power, lumping it together with desire for worldly renown—glória de mandar, cobiça de fama—calling both futile. Both, he says, are justly punished with loss of peace of mind and loss of earthly belongings, including entire countries—de reinos e de impérios. Not mentioning anyone in particular, he speaks of vain hearts—peito vão—and the foolish crowd—o povo néscio, in contrast to his own wisdom. But then he applies his maxim to Portugal—estes reinos—and to the men of the fleet—esta gente, asking them rhetorically if they are aware of the new disasters to which their ambition will lead them, mad Adam's true sons. If their minds are set on risking their lives in savage warfare for the sake of extending the Christian religion, why don't they continue to fight the Moor in nearby North Africa? To travel all the way to the remote and unfamiliar Indies will only weaken the home country. By mentioning the pompous titles of ruler of India, Persia, Arabia and Ethiopia, the Old Man aims a barb at last at the vainglory of one specific individual, King Manuel himself, who actually used those titles, and of his successors, who continued the practice.

Thereupon the Old Man retreats into generalities, cursing the Argonauts, those mythical heroes who committed the sacrilege of building the first seagoing vessels, as well as those others who gave fire to humankind or gave them wings with which to fly, setting bad examples of excessive boldness. On that note, the harangue ends.

The reproach of lust for power had been voiced before in the same canto. The poet had condemned an earlier monarch's ambition to extend his rule over Castile. To characterize it he used the same expression: glória de mandar.¹ Towards the end of the poem, in Canto IX, the goddess of the sea who rewards Gama with a view of the true model of the universe also asks him to repress greed and ambition, as well as false notions of grandeur—honras vãs. She reserves her strongest condemnation for what she calls the vice of infamous, oppressive tyranny—o vício da tirania infame e urgente.

The tone of the censures is unmistakably moral, as well as political. One has to keep in mind that the poem ends with pleas by the poet himself, urging the ruling King, young Sebastian, to retake all of the Moroccan ports, an overambitious adventure that was to prove more disastrous than anything feared by the Old Man, although he, too, had justified war on Muslims.

The Old Man's speech contrasts with a young man's, which precedes it. Brief reference is made to the words pronounced by King Manuel, then twenty-three years of age, in the royal council, as he entrusts Gama, aged thirty-five or six, with the exploratory voyage, promising him honors and fame if he will risk his life fearlessly—sem medo infame (st. 78).

The appearance of the Old Man on the scene and the speech he makes intrigue the reader not only because they seem to contradict the central idea of the Lusiads. They puzzle also because they combine such diverse elements. In the figure of the Old Man we recognize the mouthpiece of the families, but also the literary replica of allegorical figures enlivening the monuments, façades, paintings and maps conceived in Europe since the Renaissance, to illustrate the contrast between old age and youth, prudence and rashness, tradition and innovation. Almost every line of the speech, as the commentators have been eager to demonstrate, echoes earlier writers. For this episode, historians, especially João de Barros, furnished the background of widespread opposition voiced in the general assemblies and royal council meetings during the reigns of João II, Manuel, and João III. The diatribes against ambition, war, seafaring, and luxurious living recall similar outbursts in the writings of the humanists, from Erasmus of Roterdam to Fray Luis de León, including Camões' countrymen, the poets Sá de Miranda and António Ferreira. All had aimed at adding authority and beauty to their own writings by adopting the phrasing and the mythological allusions of the ancient authors. Thus, Camões' preference went to Virgil, Ovid and Horace in the wording of the Old Man's allusions to Prometheus, Phaeton and Icarus.

The religious note is struck in the Old Man's reference to Adam's responsibility for man's sinful nature and in his pleas to value life because of Christ's sacrifice. The poet's own grievous experiences in Africa and Asia add a fourth dimension. They lend force to certain expressions, such as um saber só de experiências feito, characterizing the Old Man in st. 94, his reminder that it is a Christian duty to fight for religion (st. 100), the exclamation over man's wretched lot—mísera sorte (st. 104), or the poet's assurance that evildoers will be forgotten if no one celebrates them in literature.

INTERPRETATIONS OF THE EPISODE

Before the first critical interpretations appeared, imitations were attempted, not to mention translations. One of the earliest imitators, Luís Pereira (Brandão), published the epic Elegíada in 1588, a kind of sequel to the Lusíads, since it dealt with the final years of King Sebastian's unfortunate reign. Pereira introduced several venerable graybeards who, like the Old Man on the Restelo, function as Cassandras, warning against dire things to come. In particular one trembling old fellow addresses the young King in Lisbon, just after the fatal decision has been made to undertake the Moroccan expedition. In a weary voice, he gives vent to the pain which this wrong step causes him. He does not blame Sebastian so much as the representatives of the estates of the realm, who did not dare speak out. Pereira's old man concludes his speech by warning that the Lord has already announced the punishment to follow through the appearance of a comet.

Unfortunately, Pereira did not possess the poetic inspiration, the technical skill, the knowledge of literature, history or mythology, or the rich personal experience of a Camões. The pedestrian Elegíada cannot stand comparison with the Lusiads. The speech of Pereira's old man lacks persuasive force and complex connotations. Aside from a few references to ancient history, it does not reach beyond the immediate reality it dramatizes.

The complexity of Camões' thought used to be simplified by those who commented on the Restelo episode in Canto IV of the Lusiads. Each interpreter picked out one particular idea, although he may have been educated and even pedantic enough to identify the possible literary sources of passage after passage. Few asked themselves what purpose could have been served by using precisely those sources.

Manuel de Faria e Sousa, one of the first commentators, was the most diligent and ingenious ever. In his notes, completed in 1632,² though published only in 1639, on the eve of the war of the Portuguese secession from Spain, he stated peremptorily:

This old man here represents the Kingdom of Portugal …, and that he does so can be clearly seen from the Poet's description of Lusus, its founder, … for whom he uses the same periphrase in st. 77 of Canto Seven: Hum velho branco, aspeito venerando.

(Lusíadas, Madrid, 1639, Vol. I, col. 420)

The sweeping allegorical interpretation resembles others offered by Faria e Sousa: Jupiter's identification with the Trinity, and Jesus Christ in particular; Venus's with the Virgin Mary; and Bacchus's as the Devil. One might jump to the conclusion that voyages of discovery or conquest, such as Gama's, were unpatriotic, since Portugal objects because of the likely consequences, i.e. the moral, economic and political decline of the mother country. The only remaining justification would be a religious one, Faria e Sousa points out. “If,” he wrote, “the Catholic religion had not been spread by this means, the discovery of India would have been exceedingly bad in every respect” (Ibidem).

Incidentally, Faria e Sousa's interpretation was to be taken up by some intellectuals of the twentieth century, although without its religious angle. Afrânio Peixoto, the Bahian physician, thought that the Old Man represented one of two Portugals. He wrote an essay in 1921, perhaps inspired by Fidelino de Figueiredo's theory of two Spains warring with one another since the sixteenth century.³ In it he distinguished a rural, conservative Portugal in the northern half from a seagoing, adventurous Portugal to the south. In his opinion, the former had again come to the fore in twentieth century nationalism, a northern phenomenon, foreshadowed in the figure of the Old Man: “The Old Man of the Restelo … represented the other [Portugal], endowed with a wisdom achieved through experience, like today's Portugal, or, if you will, its present nationalism, to say it in one, more beautiful word” (Ibidem, p. 198). On the other hand, Faria e Sousa's reference to economic decay was revived and developed further by Peixoto's and Figueiredo's contemporary, António Sérgio, the philosopher-economist who similarly saw the country split, though not on geographic lines.

A vast void seems to have followed the attentive criticism practiced by Faria e Sousa. Only when the study of national literatures became a branch of higher learning in the wake of the Romantic movement was the interpretation of the works—and lives—of individual authors, such as Camões, undertaken. The wind of innovation began to blow among students at Coimbra University as late as the 1860s. Their view of the epic past was exemplified in their understanding of the Restelo episode. Actually, all they did, with less sobriety, was to advance on the road opened by that great enemy of absolute power or the myths of divine origin on which it rested, the historian Alexandre Herculano. Herculano could have had the Lusiads in mind when he scoffed at the politicians of his time who kept invoking the ancestral feats in Africa and the Orient in spite of the results—enriching other nations while leading to the loss of the habits of hard work and frugal living among the Portuguese, in the pursuit of quick, temporary wealth, at the loss of character and representative government. It would be more useful, materially and morally, Herculano added, if the politicians were to tell the people how trade was carried on in Lisbon during the fourteenth century and how the land was farmed then.⁴ The young Coimbrans, men such as Antero de Quental and his circle, felt the same way but proposed more radical measures before giving up all hope of reform. “From a heroic perspective—who could deny it?—the movement of the Spanish and Portuguese conquests was a bright and in some regards sublime burst of light breaking out of the intrepid Peninsular soul,” Antero exclaimed in his 1871 lecture on the causes of the decadence of the peoples of the Peninsula during the past three centuries. Yet he went on: “Events that could inspire Camões' great soul belong in the realm of poetry, now and forever. Unhappily, that warlike spirit is out of place in the modern age. Modern nations are fated to produce science, not poetry.”⁵

In the name of positive science—sociology, political science, philosophy of history—the university youth could see in the Lusiads no more than the poetry of a painfully outdated past. “When Camões conceived his Lusiads, Portugal had already entered on the road to decadence and the poem was like a protest by a rebelling conscience.” Thus wrote Quental's colleague Teófilo Braga, teacher of Portuguese literature,⁶ soon after patriotic fervor had reached a high momentary pitch during the commemorations of the third centenary of Camões' death in 1880 and again in reaction to the British ultimatum of 1890 ending dreams of a vaster empire in southern Africa. One may assume that the short verse “rhapsody,” O velho do Restelo, which Braga published in 1898, stressed the same points he was to make in his last book on Camões, after the fall of the monarchy and the proclamation of a Portuguese republic:

1. The most important part of the Old Man's speech was his protest against King João III's policy of abandoning several African strongholds while encouraging favored courtiers to plunder India.⁷

2. Camões showed in the Old Man's speech and other passages of the Lusiads that he perceived the connection between domination of Morocco and domination of the Iberian Peninsula.⁸

3. Camões' criticism of the crazy policy pursued by João III⁹ and the megalomania and greed for power of his degenerate predecessor Manuel I¹⁰—the qualifiers are Braga's—justified republicanism. The mad (desvairado) rule of King Manuel contained the seeds of Portugal's decadence.¹¹

Only one member of the Generation of 1870, the journalist, historian and politician J. P. de Oliveira Martins, did not join the rest in blaming the men of the sixteenth century for the outcome. He considered the causes of decadence predetermined, as simple and necessary consequences of previous greatness, like life and death in individuals, as he wrote in 1879.¹² Already in 1872 he had published a book in which he maintained that it was not Camões who contradicted himself in the Old Man's speech, but that the poet sensed the contradiction between heroic enterprises and the fatal weaknesses that could not be overcome:

With the intuition of poetic genius, Camões felt the fundamental contradiction inherent in things which creates the antinomy between heroism and fortune, requiring sacrifice as the necessary condition of the feat. He felt the greatness of the national deed, feeling at the same time how that deed was killing us.

And towards the end of the work, Oliveira Martins clarified his thought further:

It fell to the Lusitanian people, you who are such a small part [of humankind] in the world (Canto VII, st. 2), it fell to them to complete the epic of the Crusades. … There you have the political idea of the Lusiads, clearly expressed in those very terms in the mouth of the Old Man of the Restelo.¹³

Such reflections did not extend to condemnation of colonial practices, although Oliveira Martins considered giving up the colonies as uneconomical. For one thing, all of the naval powers of Europe were again bent on expansion, especially inside Africa; for another, the educated class in Portugal was diverted from reality by the Camões celebrations. It took the civil strife that plagued the republican regime from the outset and the threat to the colonies in connection with the First World War to bring about an overdue self-examination. New interpretations of the Restelo episode appeared, which have to be understood in the light of those circumstances. Foremost among the commentators were poets and educators belonging to our century.

Taking up thoughts expressed already by Faria e Sousa and developed systematically by Oliveira Martins, António Sérgio examined the lamentable condition of the country. As an economist, a logician and an educator, hostile to Sebastianist self-delusions (as Oliveira Martins had been), Sérgio returned again and again to the speech of the Old Man. The Old Man's warnings, like similar criticism reported by the chroniclers of that time, seemed almost identical to his own as he looked at Portuguese colonialism in the twentieth century: the gross imbalance between the promotion of what he called “the policy of transport,” i.e., the exploitation of colonies through trade, and the neglect of “the policy of fixation,” i.e., the productivity of the home country.¹⁴ He also spoke of one as “adventurism” and the other as “stability.”¹⁵ Unlike Oliveira Martins, Sérgio admired and adopted the ethical viewpoint. “Camões,” he remarked, “did not hesitate to put the criticism of the enterprise into the mouth of the wisest, most philosophical and most venerable of his heroes.”¹⁶ How then is the contradiction between the speech and the main theme of the poem to be explained? “There are different levels of reality, according to Camões' thinking, as there were according to Pascal's. … Above the level of glorious action is the level of wisdom, which is precisely the one on which the Old Man speaks.”¹⁷ Elsewhere, Sérgio adds: “Fortunately there is no trace of nationalism in that patriotic poem. The speech of the Old Man on the Restelo raised it to the level of critical humanism.”¹⁸ The same kind of moral criticism can be seen, as Sérgio points out, in other passages of the Lusiads, as well as in some of the lyrical poems, notably the epistle on the “World in Disarray,” the third elegy and the quatrains of “Babel and Zion,” which contain the lines:

Remember, Lord, to punish Edom's wicked sons. Those who, puffed up with power, are stained with poor innocent blood, crush them utterly: let them know that they are but humans.

And Sérgio, the man who spent almost his entire life in dangerous opposition, concluded:

There we touch the highest and essential part of our poet's moral thinking, that which we have sometimes called the highest level of his doctrine. It explains the presence of the opposition's criticism—a crítica oposicionista—in the Lusiads, which is what the speech of the Old Man on the Restelo is.¹⁹

As far as I know, Sérgio never went so far as to recommend the abandonment of any colony, especially not of those in Africa where the surplus population of Portugal might be resettled. He did not agree, however, with the numerous officials who, under the cloak of “assimilation,” suppressed African aspirations, even if they were fellow republicans, such as General Norton de Matos, who often lamented that his generation had to contend with “the vociferations of the Old Man of the Restelo.”²⁰

Sérgio gained followers among the academic youth at whom he aimed his teachings. His ideas were echoed by the novelist José R. Miguéis, for example, who saw in the overseas expansion a

great and tragic bloodletting, endured physically and mentally by the Portuguese people, its fascinated, deluded and to its undoing, willing victims.

Going back to Camões and other Christian humanists, Miguéis wrote, substituting “Spirit” for “religion”:

Unable to hold on to everything at the same time, we gave up the enduring values of the Spirit for tangible but ephemeral benefits. Mammon—o pataco—has become our God and sovereign.²¹

António José Saraiva, a cultural historian, embraced Sérgio's idea of different levels of consciousness in the Lusiads, calling them “tectonic layers,” while confessing that he could not resolve the contradiction between the Old Man's critical humanism and the epic glorification of Gama's voyage.²² Neither Miguéis nor Saraiva drew practical conclusions from the episode, as Sérgio had. Saraiva saw in the Old Man, “who is Camões himself,”²³ merely someone who talked like the earlier poets that scorned the ignorant crowd—o povo néscio—and judged events according to humanist standards.

Certain poets disagreed. Pascoaes closed his eyes to the detestable present, hoping for the future or longing for the past, in a constant exaltation of saudade. His Livro de memórias ended with this profession:

… saudade of the Native Land is really our native land. We adore absence and we despise presence. We prefer remote, uncertain India beyond the seas to the bit of land where we were born. We go and colonize Africa and Brazil, and let the weeds grow at our doorstep. Well done! Well done! I, too, despise the present and take refuge in the Past, to save from my death some of my fondest memories. May the Lord have pity on them and on me!²⁴

Fernando Pessoa, like Pascoaes and unlike Sérgio, inclined to dream of high adventure in the past, of King Sebastian and other mystic presences, interpreted the Old Man as the symbol of one of two necessary social forces. Necessary for the functioning of the state, they were the integrating “opinion based on habit” and the disintegrating “opinion based on the higher instinct or intuition.” The latter he saw embodied in the Vasco da Gama of the Lusiads.²⁵ They balanced each other, Pessoa believed, in a common patriotic fervor:

Although they are antagonistic, these two opinions meet at one point, the ideal of national greatness—a grandeza pátria. Opposing the novelty of exploration, tradition, the Old Man, embodying tradition, spoke in the name of the ideal of the Empire; in the name of the same ideal, Gama set out on the road to discoveries.

By a rhetorical slight of hand, equating nation with empire, the modern poet defended the antiquated notion of an overseas empire.²⁶ In one of his poems, Pessoa evoked the tears shed by women and children at Gama's departure, as Camões had when setting the stage for the Old Man's speech. Unlike Camões, he dismissed them, declaring that the ambitious adventure was worth all the tears: “Was it worth the pain? Everything is worth the pain, if the soul is great enough”—Valeu a pena? Tudo vale a pena / Se a alma não é pequena.²⁷

A quarter of a century later, Miguel Torga, the telluric poet of rugged Trás-os-Montes, but also a restless wanderer, still agreed in essence with Pessoa. Torga called the Old Man the embodiment of the earthbound common sense which

instinctively defends itself against a destiny it never liked deep down, although it disposed and still disposes of a tempting pier in Lisbon, from whence to embark, actually or in the imagination.²⁸

Like Pessoa, he was in love with adventure, feeling all the same a dark foreboding, like all Portuguese. On March 1, 1967, he wrote in his diary:

When a poet hits the nail on the head he has no equal! What a living symbol of everything that is dead in us, that Old Man of the Restelo! … Portugal suggested to Camões the negative image of routine-bound man, solidly installed, lacking drive and imagination. … Even those who go on adventure carry renunciation within their souls. They leave, having desisted from the feat they cannot accomplish at home.²⁹

A few years passed, and Jorge de Sena, poet and critic combined, raised Torga's thought to the level of a general view of human nature, while he was experiencing the homelessness of contemporary Portuguese intellectuals. No doubt coming very close to Camões' idea, he wrote:

The Old Man does not rail against the act of conquest but against the contradiction in human nature which is not fully developed unless it cuts the umbilical cord that ties it to the matrix where it was begotten.³⁰

Sena rightly sees the speech as an echo of the meditation about the little earthlings at the end of the first canto, the giant Adamastor's prophecies in the fifth, and the observations on the storm in the sixth.

Everybody seemed to have discarded the belief in an immanent justice governing human history, which has to be dreaded, let alone the belief in divine punishment, when lo! it returned in João P. Grabato's Quybyricas, poema éthico, an epic tour de force, published in Mozambique in 1972. Its starting point was the same as Pereira's in the old Elegíada, that is, King Sebastian's doom in the battle of Alcazar. Grabato puts the harangue into Camões' mouth. In the second of the nine cantos, Camões is made to condemn the senseless cruelty of the Portuguese in the Orient and the false feeling of superiority it gave them. Paraphrasing the “glory of command” passage, Grabato-Camões gives it a different slant:

Where respect and brotherliness had been—at least in some—the seed of vile chauvinism must have been sown, manifesting itself in the most callous rapacity. Now all respect has turned into authoritarianism, and all love into mere arrogance. All this in the name of the cross, as if the cross were a piece of wood to be used as a club and not as a torch!

(st. 151)

The fear of retribution was being felt again, as the African wars of liberation were dragging on:

What vengeance will be wrought in the days ahead—which, history teaches us, always comes to pass—when the smiling Barbarians will feel as self-assured as we do now? What accounts will not be settled then with guiltless generations, which have no other fault than to be born along the road to the future?

(st. 156)

I repudiate the men of old! They paid no heed to what was well and good. … They showered praise on the spillers of blood, in awe of them!

(st. 161)

CONCLUSIONS

Unquestionably, one could gather further examples of the uses and interpretations which have been made of the harangue delivered by the old prophet of doom in the Lusiads. His speech and its place in the poem are so interwoven with humanist ideals, Christian teachings, Portuguese history, the poet's own experiences and general human feelings that they are reinterpreted and applied to different situations by almost each thoughtful reader. The echoes it awakened in Brazil have not even been considered yet, especially in works written since the Week of Modern Art in 1922 when the ambition to create a great national culture was rekindled in the minds of Brazilian artists and writers.³¹ Nor have the interpretations given to the episode in other languages been included, for example by Richard Fanshaw, who first rendered the Old Man's outcry in English verse (London, 1655):

O Glory of commanding! O vain Thirst
Of that same empty nothing, we call Fame!

or by Aubrey F. G. Bell, who early in this century compared the Old Man's stand to that of the “Little Englanders” led by Gladstone, who opposed Disraeli's empire-building.³²

Curiously, Brazilian poets rejected the Old Man's pessimism outright, considering the adventure of Portuguese expansion as heralding and justifying the westward expansion of their own country. Thus Ribeiro Couto turned the moral censure into praise when he hailed the colonization of Matto Grosso: … “Bold race thirsting for riches … Race fired with ambition to construct.”³³

On the other hand, a Catholic writer in Germany, Reinhold Schneider, saw in the Old Man's speech an announcement—Verkündigung—which reminded twentieth-century Europeans of their task—Aufgabe—to transform their empires spiritually—Vergeistigung. “We do not have unconditional power, but we are at liberty to administer the spiritual-ethical domains circumscribed by our power,” Schneider concluded in 1930, at the height of depression and turmoil in central Europe.³⁴

Schneider's meditation leads from the conclusion about the great variety of interpretations to a second about their relevance. Every intellectual who has reflected on the episode of the Old Man has seen it in the light of his own times and circumstances. He has chosen from it what suited his own preoccupations. This was true of Manuel de Faria e Sousa when identifying the Oldster with Portugal proper in 1636, at the time of profound trouble in his country, as the burden of empire was dragging it down in the fight of survival against the Dutch. It is still true; the Old Man speaks today to worries about man's survival among technological advances. João Saramago, a minor Portuguese poet, was moved to imagine what the Old Man may have to say to an astronaut³⁵ after Hernani Cidade, one of the most diligent Camonists, had observed how the misfortunes Camões and his seafaring nation had experienced during his lifetime made it impossible for the poet to maintain “the optimistic pride with which the navigations had begun.” Thus, Camões' Old Man seemed to condemn all progress. “One might say,” Cidade concluded, “that the speech prophetically condemns all advances leading up to … the atom bomb.”³⁶

Notes

1. The Lusiads, C. IV, st. 57, referring to Afonso V's invasion of Castile to claim its throne.

2. 1636 is the date of Faria e Sousa's manuscript of the edition of the Lusiads, which is preserved at the Biblioteca da Ajuda, Lisbon, not far from the Restelo Beach. His notes show that they were written during a period of several years while he lived in Rome.

3. First published by Afrãnio Peixoto in the form of an open letter addressed to Fidelino de Figueiredo, the Portuguese historian-critic, in the review A Águia, Porto, and later on reprinted in Ensaios camonianos, Coimbra, Imprensa da Universidade, 1932, pp. 187-201.

4. See A. Herculano's pamphlet Solemnia verba of 1850.

5. See Antero de Quental, Prosas, Vol. II, Lisbon, Couto Martins, n.d., pp. 127-128.

6. See Teófilo Braga, Comões e o sentimento nacional, Porto, Chardron, 1891, p. 60.

7. See Teófilo Braga, Camões: A obra lyrica e épica, Porto, Chardron, 1911, p. 522.

8. Ibidem, pp. 523-524.

9. Ibidem, p. 522.

10. Ibidem, pp. 570-571.

11. Ibidem, p. 590.

12. See Joaquim Pedro de Oliveira Martins, História da Civilizaçao ibérica, 9th ed., Lisbon, Guimarães & Cia., 1954, pp. 290-291.

13. Joaquim Pedro de Oliveira Martins, Camões, os Lusíadas e a Renascença em Portugal, 3rd ed., Lisbon, Guimarães & Cia, 1952, pp. 86, 263. The first edition dates from 1872.

14. See António Sérgio's lecture “As duas políticas nacionais,” Lisbon, January 1925, printed in Ensaios, Vol. III, and reproduced in Prosa doutrinal de autores portugueses, 2nd series, António Sérgio, Lisbon, Portugália, n.d., pp. 62-93.

15. Ibidem, pp. 65, 68.

16. See António Sérgio, “Sobre a política de Camões,” Seara Nova, Lisbon, no. 359, October 12, 1933, pp. 359-365.

17. Ibidem.

18. See António Sérgio, “Em torno das ideias políticas de Camões,” Ensaios, Vol. IV, Lisbon, Seara Nova, 1934, p. 113.

19. See António Sérgio, Preface to Camões' Odes …, Vol. II, Paris, Livraria Francesa e Estrangeira, n.d., p. 11.

20. See Norton de Matos, “O nosso modo de ver,” Seara Nova, Lisbon, no. 500-503, 1937, pp. 307-309, as quoted by Vitorino de Magalhães-Vilhena in António Sérgio, Lisbon, 1964, p. 180.

21. See José Rodrigues Miguéis, “Pureza de raça—ou pureza de cultura?” Diário de Notícias, New Bedford, Mass., March 26, 1959.

22. See António José Saraiva, “Para uma interpretação de Os Lusíadas,” O Comércio do Porto, July 22, 1958, p. 5. The same idea is developed in his Luís de Camões, Publicações Europa-América, 1959, p. 122ff. and p. 143ff.

23. See António José Saraiva, Luís de Camões, p. 124.

24. Joaquim Teixeira de Pascoaes, Livro de memórias, Coimbra, 1927. Quoted from Obras completas, Vol. VII, Prosa, I, Lisbon, Bertrand, n.d., p. 277.

25. See Fernando Pessoa's political pamphlet O interregno—Defesa e justificação da ditadura militar, Lisbon, 1928, i.e. published when the armed forces had accepted Oliveira Salazar's leadership.

26. See the summary of Fernando Pessoa's pamphlet given by João Gaspar Simões in Vida e obra de Fernando Pessoa, Vol. II, Lisbon, Bertrand, n.d., especially p. 295.

27. Fernando Pessoa, “Mar português,” Mensagem, Lisbon, 1934.

28. See Miguel Torga, Portugal, 2nd ed., Coimbra, 1957, p. 115.

29. See Miguel Torga, Diário, Vol. X, Coimbra, 1968, pp. 126-127.

30. See Jorge de Sena, A estrutura de “Os Lusíadas,” Lisbon, Portugália, 1970, p. 140.

31. Some hints at the Brazilian Modernists' surprising interest in Camões are offered in Gilberto Mendonça Teles's dissertation Camões e a poesia brasileira, Rio de Janeiro, MEC, 1973.

32. Aubrey F. G. Bell, Luis de Camões, London, Oxford University Press, 1923, p. 89.

33. See Ribeiro Couto, “Noroeste,” in Noroeste e outros poemas, São Paulo, Companhia Editora Nacional, 1933, p. 244.

34. See Reinhold Schneider, Das Leiden des Camoes, 2nd ed., Cologne & Olten, Hegner, 1957, p. 208. The first edition appeared in 1930.

35. João Saramago, “Fala do Velho do Restelo ao astronauta,” in Os poemas possíveis, Lisbon, Portugália, 1966, p. 76.

36. See Hernani Cidade, Luís de Camões, Vol. II, O épico, 2nd, rev. ed., Lisbon, Revista da Faculdade de Letras, 1953, p. 126.