SOURCE: Camoens and the Sons of Lusus, The Hispanic and Luso Brazilian Council, 1973, 18 p.

[In this lecture, delivered in 1972 to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Lusiads,Atkinson praises Camões as the last great epic poet, offering a brief biography and a broad explication of his most famous poem. Atkinson focuses largely on Camões' neoclassical poetics, but also addresses his presentation of colonialism and his dedication of the epic to the young King Sebastian.]

“Never ask a poet,” Socrates counselled long ago, “the meaning of his poem. He will be the last person who can tell you.” Socrates subscribed, beyond modern inclination, to the theory of divine afflatus, that would have the poet the unconscious instrument of purposes beyond his comprehension, a vehicle of oracular revelation. This much validity may still be allowed the concept, that it is one mark, indeed the hallmark, of great poetry, great literature, that though written in and for an age, it continues to have a message for succeeding ages, that will not always be the same message and may indeed be something far removed from what the poet sought consciously to convey. Beauty, we are led to believe, resides in the eye of the beholder. So too, we may yet come to believe, does truth, in this world grown sceptical as all our absolutes shade into the relative.

Yet something of beauty, something of truth, there must be in the poem itself, the work of art, on which the mind's eye can fasten in order to work out its own interpretation, and this still leaves to the poet a responsible rôle alike in the genesis and in the shaping of his handiwork. It is therefore sound critical practice, and common sense, not only to take the finished work, examine its perfection, assess its achievement, catalogue its beauties, but to credit the artist with a purpose as well as a technique and to seek, by delving into the creative process, to surprise and re-create that purpose. We may then, perchance, discover too the key to his continuing significance to divers climes and ages, and apply our own touchstone to the Socratic dictum by relating that significance, as we apprehend it, to that purpose as we have been able to decipher it.

Enough has been said—it could be everything has been said—on The Lusiads as the supreme expression of the last great epic age, as at once the most eloquent and most moving synthesis of the greatness that was Portugal and the outstanding masterpiece of that country's literature, as the one heroic poem since the Aeneid whose author is worthy to stand alongside Virgil, as the most explicit testimony we have of what it meant to be a scholar and a poet in the heyday of the Renaissance. Its artistry has been minutely analysed, its erudition, its literary indebtednesses, commentary running on occasion to many times the length of the text. Its message has, for the most part, been taken as lying on the surface, crystal-clear that all who run may read. “Let us now praise famous men, and their fathers who begat them.” What a great and glorious thing it is to be a Portuguese!

The foreign scholar or translator, not having that privilege, is apt to read something more, or different, into it, if only to justify his interest. As a curiosity in the annals of translation one may salute in passing the boldness with which James Mickle, in his version of 1776, interpreted the work as “the epic poem of the birth of commerce, and, in a particular manner, the epic poem of whatever country has the control and possession of the commerce of India”, virtually taking it over as something thrown in with that empire of the East to which England had in his day succeeded, and thinking nothing of interpolating a 300-line naval enagement of his own imagining or of cutting by two-thirds Camoens' moving peroration. We do not compete with Mickle. The object of the present essay in interpretation is to look first in the circumstances—“Man is man in his circumstance,” corner-stone of the Ortegan philosophy—of the author at the relevant time and place, then in the text, which is our ‘circumstance’, for clues to what the poet was about, what the poem is all about. And if we find that, read as Camoens intended it should be read, it still has relevance to the human situation four hundred years on, and not merely artistic appeal to readers with a taste attuned to literary norms and kinds of an age long past, then we may accept that, divine afflatus or no, the poet did build better than he knew and we are indeed in the presence of a masterpiece.

Camoens, born a poet, would have been a very different and certainly much lesser poet had he come ten years earlier, or ten years later. Coinciding most felicitously with the first flowering of the Renaissance in Portugal, he arrived at Coimbra as the ancient university was still shaking down after its definitive translation thither in 1537, re-juvenated with the band of distinguished scholars, our own George Buchanan among them, drawn from all over western Europe to that end. Another few years, and that promise would be in eclipse as the dark shadows of religious obscurantism closed in. “Is it true,” they asked Buchanan, brought from the Inquisition cells to stand trial for heresy, “that you do not believe in purgatory?” “I did not,” was the reply: “I do now.”

Purgatory did not need as yet to figure on Camoens' intellectual horizon. The slough of despond he was to plumb soon enough. On the banks of the Mondego he soared to new heavens of delight as he essayed his poetic wings, made free of a whole new world of the imagination illumined by moderns like Petrarch, Boiardo, Ariosto, but still drawing its sap and vigour from the ancients. It is not merely the pedantry of his age that calls for a classical dictionary if the reader today would savour The Lusiads in Portuguese. Baudelaire's ‘Cherchez les rapports’ has been to the poet in all ages an instinctive imperative. Two thousand years and more have passed since Aristotle first pinpointed it with his observation that “the greatest excellence of all, and a certain mark of genius, is to be happy in the use of metaphor, in the quick discernment of resemblances”. Classical history and mythology were to be our poet's constant frame of reference, if only from his concern to show his heroes and their achievements as the equals, often the superiors, of any the past could boast.

The richly stored mind nothing in later experience could take away from him; nor, harshly though most of that experience was to contrast with the happiness of those student years, would he weaken in the basic convictions that were already become so many strands in his character. The Lusiads is shot through with evidence of the store he set by loyalty to his monarch and to the institution of monarchy; by a patriotism compounded of love, pride and a deep sense of responsibility; and, overriding all else, by unquestioning acceptance of the Christian faith as the one and only true religion, with the corollary that God's purpose for mankind required the spreading of that faith to all peoples everywhere—“Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature”,—by persuasion where possible, by the sword if necessary, herein residing the concept of the holy war and the justification of conquest and empire.

In natural endowment gifted far beyond the commonalty, as well read in the directions that mattered as any of his time and years could hope to be, Camoens did not take with him to India a mental baggage of any great originality, and the range of experience there awaiting him he would share with many of his compatriots. What would give him the towering individuality that so impresses today was, firstly, his uniquely sensitive reaction to ambience and events. Experience, it has been remarked, is not what happens to one but what one does with what happens to him. And, secondly, the rare mastery he at length came by of that fundamental problem of all creative writing, the transmuting of life into literature.

But let us stay with the first for the other is not, in the sense we have taken from Ortega, circumstantial. They were stirring days for Portugal that Camoens had grown up in. Again and again, reading The Lusiads, we are reminded of the geography lesson: the geography of Europe, of India, of the Far East—outward by the mainland, return trip by the islands,—of the still emerging Far West, the whole bringing forcefully home to us that of all the physical sciences—navigation, astronomy, physics, botany, mineralogy, medicine—that the great age of Spanish and Portuguese discovery was opening up to the European and re-endowing with the experimental technique, none was half so compelling to contemporaries as the unveiling of ever new regions of the globe, the adding to the map of new continents and oceans, the gradual rounding out of man's hitherto so limited knowledge of the world he had to come to terms with.

It is all there, the facts and the wonder of it, in the poem. Much of it, taken from the printed page, was already in the poet's head when he set out. But the reader notes that, whereas Camoens' first-hand experience of Portuguese achievement in the East comes down to 1567, and his poem was only prepared for the printer after his return to Lisbon nearly three years later, the survey given by Tethys in prophecy to da Gama ends with the death of João de Castro, last of the great Viceroys, in 1548, five years before the poet's arrival in Goa. Camoens could have sensed before leaving Lisbon that the epic days were already over. After half a century the evidence was cumulative both that the drain on manpower and resources of the emprise of India was beyond what a people numbering perhaps a million and a quarter, could long sustain, and—much more significantly—that the vast accretion of wealth, making that people of a sudden the richest nation in Europe, had wrought disastrous consequences alike on its economy and on its moral fibre.

Camoens, having lost his right eye in Ceuta, already bore in his own person a reminder of the individual price to be paid for empire. Of the four ships that sailed for India in May 1553 his alone arrived, a grim reminder of the collective price. But grimmer still, to one of deep moral as well as poetic sensibility, was the pervading atmosphere he found on arrival; and it is this, over the long years to come, that was to be his enveloping ‘circumstance’. His muse, that at home had disported itself with the amorous dalliance of youth, found in India a new concern, and a new voice to match. “This Babylon, whence flows matter for every evil the world breeds …, where tyranny overrides honour … : this labyrinth where nobility, valour and learning go begging at the portals of avarice and meanness. …”¹ “In India,” Tethys would foretell to da Gama, “covetousness and ambition will make bold to set their faces openly against God and justice.” Cupid had earlier extended the indictment to the age at large, finding it lapsed into sordid materialism “through giving its heart to things meant to be used, not to be loved”. Never before, in the history of human endeavour, had so few with so little achieved so much; but gone were now the high ideals that had underlain, and largely explained, the achievement, collective ideals that a man of parts and dedication could still hope to serve. Goa, “grave of honest poverty,” preluded a long uphill struggle to salvage one's own personal ideals.

The shock of disillusion was traumatic, and from it was born—we may now legitimately infer—the germ of The Lusiads. To escape from the depression of today into the glories of a yesterday still within living memory would have been one way out for the ordinary. Camoens was no escapist, and very far from ordinary. In satire he could vent his immediate frustrations: that was a passing relief. But it afforded scant satisfaction to a poet now serious and beginning to think seriously on his responsibility as such. The art of poetry, as distinct from growing proficiency in practice, he had already studied to good effect. To the reader of The Lusiads who can dispense with the classical dictionary in favour of Virgil and Ovid, observing how poetry revitalizes itself down the ages by drinking at ancient springs, it will be a no less interesting exercise to have too at his elbow, Aristotle's Poetics and Horace's Epistola ad Pisones and note to what purpose our poet has learnt from and applied every lesson they have to teach.

But all this was means to an end. Poetry ‘delights and instructs’. The lighter breed of poets may forgo the instructing, having nothing of substance to say. The poet who has, may not forgo the delighting: if he fail first to win and then to hold the reader he writes only for himself. To this extent the art, the artistry, comes first. That Camoens had it we can now take for granted: further demonstration, further encomium, were idle repetition. Back of the instructing lies the profound observation of the Stagirite, his most profound in this context, that “on this account is poetry a more philosophical and more excellent thing than history: for poetry is more conversant about general truth, history about particular”. The enterprise taking shape in Camoens' mind was not to write history in verse—this history had already been written, very adequately, in the prose of Castanheda and Barros, his sources—but to draw from history, which is the record of experience, those general truths transcending the particular that confer on the poet so percipient his place among the philosophers. Throughout the poem, Camoens keeps underlining the tremendous weight he attaches to the rôle of the poet in the commonwealth. Material insuccess meant nothing to him in comparison with the fact that ‘learning went begging’ when only the poet-philospher could see and all had so much to learn.

Poetry—which can be written in prose, as much prose is written in verse—does not commonly give its meaning away on the surface. The student of poetry, of creative literature in general, is trained accordingly to read between the lines, to collect the wisps of internal evidence that gradually come together to unlock the door to understanding, and in particular, to be on the alert for the revealing word, the phrase, the paragraph that, consciously or unconsciously on the poet's part, can shed a flood of light on that elusive meaning. It may take little pondering on Shakespeare's purpose in Hamlet before we rise to the significance of the hero's “To be or not to be: that is the question”. Three centuries of readers of Don Quixote failed to perceive that the clue to what that so purposeful novel is all about lies in the innocent-seeming “This, Sancho, that to you appears to be a barber's basin to me is the helmet of Mambrino, and another will take it to be something else”.

Two clues in particular offer in The Lusiads. Paulo da Gama has been commenting to the Catual on board his vessel off Calicut on the beadroll of heroes depicted on his banners: “And many another figure the artists would certainly have painted had they had the favours on which the arts are nourished. It is the fault of their degenerate successors that they are not: for degeneracy, beyond a doubt, there has been, and a withdrawing from the lustre and the valour of their forerunners, in a generation so depraved in its pleasures and vanities.” The generation here pilloried, it will be obvious, is not that of da Gama but of fifty, sixty, years on—the generation of Camoens. The whole poem will be sadly mis-read if it be not perceived that any loaded remark put into the mouth of one of its characters is to be taken as addressed, more than, or instead of, to his immediate hearer or hearers, to the reader. Degeneracy: there was the stark, fundamental fact of the prevailing situation, the Portuguese situation as Camoens saw it in the East. Later, returned to Portugal, he would find it the same at home, and he begins his moving peroration, not with a paean of joy at a great undertaking nobly completed, but stricken at heart to see “this country of mine made over to lusting greed, its sense of values eclipsed in an austerity of gloom and depression”.

But we are still in India. The idealist notes how his compatriots have turned their backs on the glories of yesterday, content to settle for the grubbing of a murky today. It is a crisis not of action, of physical capacity for continuing achievement, but of character, of the continuing will to achieve, of that sense of values in eclipse. Is there point in one man's taking up the challenge? What can one man do? And here we find our second clue. It comes on the Isle of Love, towards the end of the poem, when Tethys, leading da Gama and his men to the top of a lofty mountain, reveals to him something of God's continuing purpose for his favoured Portuguese, something too of the mysterious fabric of creation. The Ptolemaic cosmology, placing the earth at the centre of the universe, had after fourteen centuries' acceptance been overthrown by Copernicus's demonstration that the earth revolved instead around the sun, one planet, not even a major one, among many. This undermining of beliefs so basic had come while Camoens was still a student at Coimbra. If, close on thirty years later, he still held to the other, presenting the earth surrounded by its series of concentric heavens, he had his reason, and his justification. Poetic truth is more excellent, because more philosophical, than the factual, and this was Camoens' way of pointing the conviction that lay at the very heart of his philosophy. Man is the centre of his universe, charged, under God, with the forging of his and its destinies. It all exists for him, it all depends on him. Remove that corner-stone of belief and he becomes the plaything of remote impersonal forces, a straw in the wind without motive for struggle or goal beyond enjoyment of the fleeting moment.Gone, to quote again from the peroration, “the sense of joyous pride and pervasive pleasure that buoys up man's spirit to face toils and travails with unfailing cheerfulness.”

Camoens took up the challenge himself. What can one man do to arrest a society in the grip of collective decay, and how? If that man be a ruler, through his rule. If a law-giver, through his laws. If a teacher or preacher, through his teaching or preaching. If a poet, through his poetry. History is full—Portuguese history as full as any—of one-man crusades, one-man stands, that have shaped the destiny of nations. Camoens thought of Afonso I, of Nun' Alvares Pereira, of Henry the Navigator, of Vasco da Gama, exemplars all of the truth a latter-day Spaniard, Ramón y Cajal, was to put into words, the truth that “Every great achievement is the result of a great passion placed at the service of a great idea”. He now had the great idea, the quickening of a blunted national conscience through exposure to the record of past splendours and glories, to an analysis of the qualities personal and collective that underlay them, and to the challenge to show that what Portuguese of earlier ages had been and done, their sons, the same breed, could still be and do. At its service he placed his great passion, the now devouring urge, compounded of patriotism and a sense of mission, “to see my enterprise through as the people of Portugal deserve”. The result was The Lusiads.

It is now, we think, become clear why the pervading tone of the poem is one of such seriousness. Passages of light relief are deftly strewed throughout the heroic narrative when the lyric poet takes over from the epic. We do well to remember that Camoens is, too, his country's supreme lyricist. “Were this collection to remain true to its title,” wrote Carolina de Michaëlis Vasconcellos in the preface to her Cem melhores poesias líricas da língua portuguesa “it would contain but one name.” And this has much to do with the artistic excellence of the whole, but nothing with its purpose.

Prologue and epilogue, alike addressed to the youthful Sebastian, come to the throne in 1568, were penned after the poet's return to Lisbon, his poem completed. The evidence we need is in the poem. It is drawn forcibly to our notice by the most striking of the many departures from the narrative norms of his model and constant inspirer, the Aeneid. Every canto of this, the twelfth and last naturally excluded, leads straight on to the next. So does Camoens' Canto II, that ends with the king of Malindi all eagerness to hear da Gama begin the long recital of his country's past. So does not a single other canto. All instead have their content so contrived as to invite interruption of the narrative with a pause for moral reflection: on the uncertainty of life, on the power of love, on over-weening ambition, on hope of fame as incentive to high endeavour, on the nature of true heroism, on dereliction of responsibility, on the depravity of self-interest, on the steep and rocky path of virtue, finally, with the epilogue, on the onus resting on the monarch to esteem, and be guided by, experience.

These are, in a sense, the set pieces, dispersed strategically through the text where they will command maximum attention. But wherever in the course of the narrative a passing moral can be pointed, the poet may be relied on to point it, and it becomes of interest to study the total picture emerging. By definition a heroic poem, the epic evolves in his hands into a practical treatise on heroism. From the very first line his readers are reminded that they spring from, belong to, a race of heroes. “Arms and the man I sing,” Virgil had begun. Camoens' nuance is subtle: “Arms and the men,” men of no ordinary stature, who sailed o'er seas that none had sailed before to the founding of a new kingdom among distant peoples, and made it great. “My theme is the daring and renown of the Portuguese, to whome Neptune and Mars alike give homage. The heroes and the poets of old have had their day: another and loftier conception of valour has arisen.” In truth the poet could scarcely, for those with eyes to see, have stated his aim more unambiguously.

Certain prior considerations will affect his reading of the evidence. The new, loftier conception relates valour to is goal. Camoens, as a fervent Christian, divides mankind into those within and those without the pale. Those without are the enemy, to whom no redeeming virtues may be conceded, who, in the name of the one true God, must be fought and worsted that His truth may prevail. Singly and collectively they are ‘treacherous unbelievers’, ‘dishonest miscreants’, ‘these uncouth tribes’, ‘barbarous heathen’. The conquest of the lands of the infidel he thus sees as the categorical imperative of the age, and Germany, England, France, Italy are lambasted in turn for their failure to recognize as much. Remember the dragon's teeth that Cadmus sowed, and the harvest he reaped. The onus thus falls the heavier on the Portuguese, but greater correspondingly the pride and glory of their whole-hearted acceptance. “This, our undertaking,” says da Gama, “to God's glory alone directed, our purpose to spread the Christian faith.” “Bringing to the peoples of India,” adds Camoens, “a new way of life under a new sovereign.” And, with the pride and the glory, the assurance that “he who fights to extend the faith of Mother Church will have God on his side”. Already in Portugal when the Muslim, still a threat there, had suffered grievous defeat, “it was clear that the divine favour had counted for more than numbers.” The Portuguese had learnt never to fear an enemy just because they were outnumbered. “How much more potent is faith than brute force”; and how consoling the knowledge that “god provides, well in advance, the means appropriate to His every end,” even to making of Monsaide, the Moor so providentially encountered in Calicut, His chosen instrument for warning da Gama of the Mecca fleet that could have brought his entire achievement to naught.

The poet is well aware that this providentialist reading of history creates difficulties. God being on the side of the Portuguese, because they are on His, and omnipotent, what rôle remains to individual valour and enterprise? No welfare state with its safety nets spread in every direction can sap initiative and weaken response to challenge as must the comforting knowledge of serving a divine purpose that, by definition, cannot know failure. The fallacy resides in the presumption that man can penetrate beyond the broad outlines of that purpose. “What God is, that no man knows, for the human mind cannot soar so high”: so Tethys to da Gama on the mountain-top. And since reverses come even to God's elect in the discharge of their divine mission, “the judgments of God”—this time it is the siren with the heavenly voice who sings—“are baffling to man. The superstitious talk of ill-luck and black misfortune: the workings of Divine Providence are the true explanation”.

It is still incumbent on those chosen to merit the choice. God will not entrust heroic enterprises to the craven-hearted. The curious intermingling of classical mythology with the Christian ethic that so puzzled the censor of 1572 has puzzled many a reader, and many a critic, since. Venus giving ear to a prayer to God; Mercury warning da Gama, “It is a command from God”; Tethys quoting the Bible, asking St. Thomas in Heaven to intercede on behalf of the Portuguese, and writing herself and the gods on Olympus off as “but creatures of fable, our only use for the turning of agreeable verses”—the poet was fully alive to the incongruities. If one has but to imagine The Lusiads stripped of all this ‘poesia e fingimento’—the censor's term—to realize how prosaic and earthbound the remainder would then appear, it is to be noted that Camoens, in so invoking the lore and legends of Greece and Rome, had a reason beyond poetic adornment, beyond the devices of prophecy that allowed the bringing of his story on for half a century after da Gama while still leaving him as protagonist and fulcrum of the whole.

Heroism is the leit-motif of classical literature, the cult of heroism as central to its ethos as that of virtue is to the Christian. Virgil's ‘pious’ Aeneas is tribute to a deed of personal bravery. The gods of antiquity are heroes granted apotheosis as their reward. “The ancients loved greatness”—Camoens is explaining the symbolism of the Isle of Love—“and were wont in imagination to endow with immortality, on the peaks of starry Olympus, the hero who had mounted aloft on the soaring wings of fame, his passport his valorous deeds and the mighty labours that attend the path of virtue, ever a steep and rocky path even though it prove in the end to have its sweets, its joys and its delights. This was their way of rewarding the sublime, immortal achievements of mortals who, in their genius and daring, partook of the divine. Jupiter, Mercury, Apollo, Mars, Aeneas, Romulus, Bacchus, Hercules, Ceres, Minerva, Juno Diana, all in their origin were but frail humanity”. The ploys of Venus siding with, of Bacchus against, the Portuguese are pleasing conceits, brilliant displays of poetic virtuosity greatly enhancing the narrative. This other comes much more nearly home to what, for Camoens, was the heart of the matter.

The reason may now be seen for the persistent invocation of the two goddesses Fame and Fortune, as persistent in the meditative parts of the poem as is, in the narrative, that of Venus and Bacchus. Fortuna, a powerful deity to the ancients—Rome erected eight temples in her honour—and writ large over the literature of the early Renaissance, does not favour the brave. Blindfold, spinning a wheel as emblem of her inconstancy, she plays havoc with human destiny. To our poet she symbolizes the uncertainty that attends man's best endeavours, making the challenge of the unknown a touchstone of high resolve and thus of character. “So it is ordained in Heaven, with this harsh and burdensome condition we come into the world: grief will know constancy, but it is in the nature of happiness to be unstable.” “No great good is ever achieved save after great adversity, and in every enterprise fear treads hard on the heels of hope.” The brave man, far from relying on fortune, will dare the fickle goddess to do her worst: she is powerful, but not all powerful. “Fortune, and even might of arms,” the nymph concedes, “can be overthrown by valour and skill.” Da Gama, his goal achieved, had already claimed as much to the Samorin: “With firmness of heart and resolve we have vanquished fickle fortune, until now we have come to set up our last landmark in this distant abode of yours.” And Tethys on the Isle of Love will bestow the final accolade: “Let the wheel of fortune turn as it will, this race of heroes will never lack honour, fame and glory”.

Honour, true honour, is subjective; and Camoens is constantly at pains to distinguish between the true and the false. Glory is objective, the seal set on achievement by recognition and duly inscribed on the scroll of time. Fame is the link, the inner compulsion inhibiting “the slumber of ignoble lethargy”,—it is again Camoens speaking—“that reduces the free spirit of man to serfdom”. The free spirit must out, the man of honour identifying himself by his pursuit of higher and ever higher, but always honourable, objectives. And since no man lives to himself, indifferent to the esteem of his fellows, fame is the spur. To the ancients she too, the goddess of the trumpet, was of great power, and Camoens' recurring advocacy of her significance and endorsement of her potency in men's affairs is a double underlining of the seriousness of his message. When, early in the story, Mercury sped down to earth at Jupiter's bidding to prepare a welcome for the argonauts at Malindi, he went accompanied by Fame, “that she might tell the people there of the rare worth of the Portuguese.” Soon da Gama is telling his royal host the story of the redoubtable Afonso, founder of the monarchy and father-figure of the emergent kingdom, incapable of repose even in old age: “If life were short, he would merge it in the longer life of fame.”

King Manoel would lay the same injunction on da Gama himself as he charged him with the so hazardous venture into the unknown: “The price of arduous and heroic achievement is toil and fatigue. Refusal to give way to fear, though it may shorten our earthly span, bestows on us the longer life of fame.” When the fearsome storm in mid-Indian Ocean threatens to engulf, da Gama in prayer draws consolation from others who have died for the faith, “winning life in the losing of it and by the manner of their dying robbing death of its sting.” Surviving, and come safe to journey's end, he reinforces yet again the poet's root contention: “It is through just such dire hazards, just such grievous toils and fears, that those who love fame achieve immortal honour and the highest esteem.” First love fame, Camoens urges on his readers; and, never glossing over but rather stressing the price to be paid, he holds out another guerdon, this side of death, that gives us the kernel of his own philosophy: “It is thus there is bred in the human breast a callous, ennobling contempt for honours and wealth, the honours and wealth that come by fortune's whim and not as the reward of virtue and endurance. It is thus that, with understanding deepened and matured by experience, there are revealed to one, as from a commanding eminence, all the pettiness and futility of ordinary life.”

Cupid, setting out on his mother's bidding to win the sea-nymphs away from their earlier hostility to the Portuguese, recognized another side to Fame: “the bold and boastful giant-goddess, speaker both of falsehood and of truth, with a hundred eyes to see and a thousand mouths to broadcast, in her rovings, all she saw.” As there are true honour, empty honours and dishonour, so fame, if the objective be wrong, can decline through notoriety to ill-fame; and Camoens has a goal beyond the firing of the individual with ambition to make his mark on life. Many heroes will in the end add up to a race of heroes. Many individuals make up a society, and the pursuit of personal fame should always have one eye fixed on making it a good society.

Not all men can be heroes in the career of arms. Even the great imperial adventure across the ocean had become by Camoens' day a concern of administration as much as of conquest. It was as trustee for the dead and absent in Macau that he reached his farthest east. In the debate that re-echoes for a century and more in Renaissance writing on the relative claims to esteem of the man of action and the man of letters—the latter having the obvious advantage in argument, since it was he who put it on record—Camoens knew both sides: “now tempest-tossed at sea, now exposed to the inhuman hazards of war, self-condemned to death with the sword in one hand and a pen in the other.” He held—it has already been noted—strong views on the importance of the poet to a civilized society and is scathing in condemnation of the philistine, especially in high places, far beyond bitterness at the scurvy neglect which was his lot. “I say it not without shame. He who is ignorant of art cannot value it. For this reason, and not for any lack of natural endowment, we have neither Virgils nor Homers: and soon, if we persist in such a course, we shall have no pious Aeneases or fierce Achilles either. Fortune has made us so uncouth, so unpolished and remiss in things of the mind, that many are scarcely interested even that this should be so. Let da Gama be grateful.” There was an uphill battle to be fought here too, with an obvious hearing on that ‘longer life of fame’, and the poet keeps reverting to it.

The issue merges, inevitably, into statecraft, linking The Lusiads with another and even more recurrent, because more urgent, preoccupation of serious writers down the sixteenth century. Hereditary monarchy had exorcized the murderous rivalries of the elective kingship that had originally allowed the Muslim invasion of the Peninsula, but carried within it its own seeds of decay in the impossibility of ensuring that each successive heir to the throne should be worthy of the charge. When the monarch is absolute the danger threatens not merely the institution but the nation, and one understands why the literature of ‘the education of a Christian prince’ should have been so prolific.

There was thus more than a subscribing to the convention of the age in Camoens' dedication of prologue and epilogue to his monarch, a callow youth but lately proclaimed king at the age of fourteen. Other writers of books sought powerful patrons as shield against the ever-present risk of offending, however inadvertently, the pillars of orthodoxy. Our poet allows Tethys a cursory nod towards “the heresies that so abound in our time”; adding, “But this is a dangerous theme, and I pass it over”. There was nothing cursory about his business with the king. How build the good society if he who is its foundation jeopardizes all? “Unshakable loyalty and obedience” he singles out repeatedly as “the crowning quality of the Portuguese”, but it is not unconditional, for “A weak king can sap the courage of a strong people”, and “Proud Portugal, accustomed to monarchs who were sovereign in all things, does not obey, nor will it tolerate, a king who is not outstanding above all his subjects in excellence”.

Once the monarch has ascended the throne it is too late for formal education. One may still read him a lesson on the qualities of his ancestors, those who played their part in raising the country to greatness, those others whose unworthiness threatened to pull it down; and The Lusiads does, among much else, just that. But, for “the understanding that is deepened and matured by experience”, inexpert, untried youth must rely on wise counsel, and it is on the choice of counsellors now more than on anything else that Camoens pins his fading hopes that the dangers looming over his beloved country might yet be averted. “Take counsel only from such as have lived long and intensely and seen a great deal of life. Those who have studied may know much; experience knows more, and to more purpose”. But even experience needs qualification. “Reward experience when it goes hand in hand with virtue by appointment to your counsels, for these are the men who know the how, the when and the whence things fall to be done.” “What a heavy charge it is on the monarch who would govern well to see that his counsellors and intimates are men of conscience and integrity.” The reference is to the deceived advisers of the Samorin in Calicut; the message is for Sebastian.

“And now, my Muse, let there be an end: for my lyre is no longer attuned and my voice grows hoarse, not from my song, but from seeing that those to whom I sing are become hard of hearing and hard of heart”. Sebastian accepted the dedication, praised the poet for “the sufficiency he showed in the book he wrote concerning the affairs of India”, and, imagining himself to be made of the stuff of heroes without need to learn from a mere poet anything of what was involved, extended the licence to print to cover—subject as always to censorship by the Inquisition—any further cantos the poet might be inspired to add once he had taken to arms.

It turned out as Camoens could already foresee it must. On the field of Alcácer-Kebir, on that June day in 1578, Sebastian led his country to total disaster. There were no cantos to be added: there was nothing more to say. The message, the purpose, of The Lusiads, that we have here sought to bring to the forefront of critical appreciation, had escaped them all. From his death-bed two years later Camoens penned his moving adieu: “All will see that so dear to me was my country that I was content to die not only in, but with it.”

But that was only the physical eclipse of a great patriot, an inspired poet and teacher, a true hero by his own most exacting standards. Four hundred years on, secure in enjoyment of the longer life of fame, he is still with us, and we recognise that what he has to say is no less valid for us than it was for the Portuguese of so long ago. We take leave of The Lusiads, till next reading, with Veloso's joyous cry on first glimpsing the nymphs on the Isle of Love: “It is obvious that there are greater and more excellent things still to be discovered in the world than we unthinking mortals dream of.” The age of discovery is never over, and we be worthy.

Note

1. Quotations throughout are taken from William C. Atkinson, Camoens: The Lusiads (Penguin Classics, 1952, reprinted 1973)