None but a nation with a beautiful land and delightful climate could be so sad. Less favoured peoples are fain to be content with what they can get, and, in their necessary efforts to obtain something, often obtain much. The Portuguese, living in a land where it is possible to support life on almost nothing, has little incentive to effort. Moreover, the Portuguese turns his imagination to the ideal, and comparing it with the real, is saddened. His pessimism is essentially that of the idealist: disillusion. He wishes for all or nothing, aims at a million and misses an unit, whereas men more practical with less intelligence it may be, and certainly less imagination, set themselves to the work before them, and prosper. But it must not be thought that, because the Portuguese cultivates a gentle melancholy, he has a poor heart that never rejoices. His sadness is often as superficial as the Englishman’s impassivity. He is, generally, far too intelligent to find life ever dull, or if he yields to ennui it is of the gorgeous philosophical kind which takes a subtle pleasure in saying that “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.” As a rule, his sense of ridicule on the one hand and his nervous self-consciousness on the other make of life for him a perpetual feast of little comedies and tragedies. But in practical matters, failing to realise his ideal, he does not attempt to idealise the real, but views it with laughter or disdain. The ideal is usually vague and set apart from practical life.
Humanity.
Thus the humanity of the Portuguese is real, they have no love of violence or bloodshed, but it is a state of mind rather than a course of action, and can be curiously combined with cruel persecutions in practice. The expulsion of the Jews came to Portugal from Spain, and it is difficult to believe that the Portuguese people ever viewed the Inquisition fires in the Rocio with anything but horror. But Vasco da Gama, Affonso d’Albuquerque, Dom João de Castro and other Portuguese in the East perpetrated cruelties as terrible as any practised by the Inquisition. It was the habit of the early discoverers to seize a few natives and, if they desired information, put them to the torture. For sheer callousness the following deed recorded of Vasco da Gama is remarkable (the date might almost be 1915): “Namen wi een scip van Mecha daer waren in drie hondert mannē en̄ tachtich en̄ veel vrouwen en̄ kinderen. En̄ wi namen daar wt wel xii. dusent ducaten en̄ noch wel x. dusent an comanscap. En̄ wi verbranden dat scip en̄ al dat volc te pulwer den tersten dach in October.” (That is: Having captured a peaceful trading ship from Mecca, and taken thereout the ducats and merchandise, the Portuguese under Vasco da Gama blew up the ship with 380 men and many women and children in her.) The Flemish sailor chronicles the fact with more directness than would have marked a Portuguese account. What is so striking is that the dreamy humanity of the Portuguese does not desert him in such an event. To take a recent instance—the murder of Lieutenant Soares in Lisbon—no foreigner could ever forget the gentle good-nature of the assassins, apparently bonhommes and affable, nor the indifference and equanimity of the small crowd that collected. Few Portuguese would consider Stevenson anything but a pagan when he exclaims, at the idea of loving all men: “God save me from such irreligion!” Such directness is foreign to their temperament. They would understand better the cry of the Canadian poet, Émile Nelligan, “J’ai voulu tout aimer et je suis malheureux,” or Corneille’s strange recommendation, “Aimez-les toutes (all women) en Dieu.”
Women.
The position of women in Portugal is another instance of vague ideals. Woman is set on a pedestal, but women are not always treated with consideration, and in some parts of the country are little better than slaves. Over and over again you will meet a man and a woman, husband and wife, perhaps, the man in lordly fashion carrying a small parcel or nothing at all, the woman bowing under a huge load. No one thinks of protesting against this, it passes without notice, nor has the Republican Parliament, which has shown itself copious in legislation, bestirred itself to introduce a bill dealing with the position of women, although it has denied them the right to vote. The peasant women continue to do twice the work of the men, and to receive half the wages. Frei João dos Santos at the beginning of the seventeenth century noted (Ethiopia Oriental, 1609) that it was “as natural for Kaffir women to work in the fields as to the women of Minho to spin,” but at the present day it is the women in Portugal who do a heavy part of out-of-door work. To their semi-slavery and Moorish toil may perhaps be ascribed partly the fact that the women in Portugal are less graceful and good-looking than the men. On the other hand, Portuguese women of all classes often display a common sense and strength and firmness of character to a greater degree than do the men.
Liberty.
Another good instance of the gulf between the ideal and the real is to be found in the conception and the practice of liberty. Abstract Liberty with a great L goes to the head of the Portuguese like wine, and in its name they have effected many a revolution and committed many a crime. In practice it can still be used, as two thousand years ago, “for a cloak of maliciousness.” “Luminous in its virginal essence rises the beneficent aspiration of a régime of liberty.” No doubt these celebrated words of Dr. Theophilo Braga on the occasion of the proclamation of the Republic were sincere, in so far as words so abstract can have any concrete quality, but their vagueness was characteristic and ominous. Equally indefinite had been the poet Snr. Guerra Junqueiro’s description of the future Republic in 1897. The Republic was to be “a high road towards a new formula of civilisation.” Such phrases, hollow and resounding like an empty barrel, have an immense success in Portuguese politics.
WOMEN AT WORK
Business Capacity.