La Casa de la Memoria, por Vicente Espinel, in Parnaso Espanol, viii. 352.
Antonio, near the end of the seventeenth century, extols Ercilla very highly, but intimates that some did not relish his simple perspicuity. Ad hunc usque diem ob iis omnibus avidissime legitur, qui facile dicendi genus atque perspicuum admittere vim suam et nervos, nativaque sublimitate quadam attolli posse, cothurnatumque ire non ignorant.
Camoens. 40. But in Portugal there had arisen a poet, in comparison of whose glory that of Ercilla is as nothing. The name of Camoens has truly an European reputation, but the Lusiad is written in a language not generally familiar. From Portuguese critics it would be unreasonable to demand want of prejudice in favour of a poet so illustrious, and of a poem so peculiarly national. The Æneid reflects the glory of Rome as from a mirror; the Lusiad is directly and exclusively what its name “The Portuguese” (Os Lusiadas) denotes, the praise of the Lusitanian people. Their past history chimes in, by means of episodes, with the great event of Gama’s voyage to India. The faults of Camoens, in the management of his fable and the choice of machinery, are sufficiently obvious; it is, nevertheless, the first successful attempt in modern Europe to construct an epic poem on the ancient model; for the Gierusalemme Liberata, though incomparably superior, was not written or published so soon. In consequence, perhaps, of this epic form, which, even when imperfectly delineated, long obtained, from the general veneration for antiquity, a greater respect at the hands of critics than perhaps it deserved, the celebrity of Camoens has always been considerable. |Defects of the Lusiad.| In point of fame he ranks among the poets of the south, immediately after the first names of Italy; nor is the distinctive character that belongs to the poetry of the southern languages anywhere more fully perceived than in the Lusiad. In a general estimate of its merits it must appear rather feeble and prosaic; the geographical and historical details are insipid and tedious; a skilful use of poetical artifice is never exhibited; we are little detained to admire an ornamented diction, or glowing thoughts, or brilliant imagery; a certain negligence disappoints us in the most beautiful passages; and it is not till a second perusal, that their sweetness has time to glide into the heart. The celebrated stanzas on Inez De Castro are a proof of this.
Its excellencies. 41. These deficiencies, as a taste formed in the English school, or in that of classical antiquity, is apt to account them, are greatly compensated, and doubtless far more to a native than they can be to us, by a freedom from all that offends, for he is never turgid, nor affected, nor obscure, by a perfect ease and transparency of narration, by scenes and descriptions, possessing a certain charm of colouring, and perhaps not less pleasing from the apparent negligence of the pencil, by a style kept up at a level just above common language, by a mellifluous versification, and, above all, by a kind of soft languor which tones, as it were, the whole poem, and brings perpetually home to our minds the poetical character and interesting fortunes of its author. As the mirror of a heart so full of love, courage, generosity, and patriotism, as that of Camoens, the Lusiad can never fail to please us, whatever place we may assign to it in the records of poetical genius.[1178]
[1178] “In every language,” says Mr. Southey, probably, in the Quarterly Review, xxvii. 38, “there is a magic of words as untranslatable as the Sesame in the Arabian tale,—you may retain the meaning, but if the words be changed the spell is lost. The magic has its effect only upon those to whom the language is as familiar as their mother tongue, hardly indeed upon any but those to whom it is really such. Camoens possesses it in perfection, it is his peculiar excellence.”]
Mickle’s translation. 42. The Lusiad is best known in England by the translation of Mickle, who has been thought to have done something more than justice to his author, both by the unmeasured eulogies he bestows upon him, and by the more substantial service of excelling the original in his unfaithful delineation.[1179] The style of Mickle is certainly more poetical, according to our standard, than that of Camoens, that is, more figurative and emphatic; but it seems to me replenished with commonplace phrases, and wanting in the facility and sweetness of the original; in which it is well known that he has interpolated a great deal without a pretence.
[1179] Several specimens of Mickle’s infidelity in translation, which exceed all liberties ever taken in this way, are mentioned in the Quarterly Review.
Celebrated passage in the Lusiad. 43. The most celebrated passage in the Lusiad is that wherein the Spirit of the Cape, rising in the midst of his stormy seas, threatens the daring adventurer that violates their unploughed waters. In order to judge fairly of this conception, we should endeavour to forget all that has been written in imitation of it. Nothing has become more commonplace in poetry than one of its highest flights, supernatural personification; and, as children draw notable monsters when they cannot come near the human form, so every poetaster, who knows not how to describe one object in nature, is quite at home with a goblin. Considered by itself, the idea is impressive and even sublime. Nor am I aware of any evidence to impeach its originality, in the only sense which originality of poetical invention can bear; it is a combination which strikes us with the force of novelty, and which we cannot instantly resolve into any constituent elements. The prophecy of Nereus, to which we have lately alluded, is much removed in grandeur and appropriateness of circumstance from this passage of Camoens, though it may contain the germ of his conception. It is, however, one that seems much above the genius of its author. Mild, graceful, melancholy, he has never given in any other place signs of such vigorous imagination. And when we read these lines on the Spirit of the Cape, it is impossible not to perceive that, like Frankenstein, he is unable to deal with the monster he has created. The formidable Adamastor is rendered mean by particularity of description, descending even to yellow teeth. The speech put into his mouth is feeble and prolix; and it is a serious objection to the whole, that the awful vision answers no purpose but that of ornament, and is impotent against the success and glory of the navigators. A spirit of whatever dimensions, that can neither overwhelm a ship, nor even raise a tempest, is incomparably less terrible than a real hurricane.
Minor poems of Camoens. 44. Camoens is still, in his shorter poems, esteemed the chief of Portuguese poets in this age, and possibly in every other; his countrymen deem him their model, and judge of later verse by comparison with his. In every kind of composition then used in Portugal, he has left proofs of excellence. “Most of his sonnets,” says Bouterwek, “have love for their theme, and they are of very unequal merit; some are full of Petrarchic tenderness and grace, and moulded with classic correctness, others are impetuous and romantic, or disfigured by false learning, or full of tedious pictures of the conflicts of passion with reason. Upon the whole, however, no Portuguese poet has so correctly seized the character of the sonnet as Camoens. Without apparent effort, merely by the ingenious contrast of the first eight with the last six lines, he knew how to make these little effusions convey a poetic unity of ideas and impressions, after the model of the best Italian sonnets, in so natural a manner, that the first lines or quartets of the sonnet excite a soft expectation, which is harmoniously fulfilled by the tercets or last six lines.”[1180] The same writer praises several other of the miscellaneous compositions of Camoens.
[1180] Hist. of Portuguese Literature, p. 187.