But the same vagueness pervades business. In business the Portuguese appears incurably careless and combines with this fault the most meticulous scruples. The result is too often delay and confusion. There as in other matters the Portuguese shows a genius for setting himself in the wrong, his real ability is eclipsed by superficial errors, the mistakes in estimates or accounts are not always in his favour, and the unscrupulous can easily take advantage of his hesitations and candour. The personal element is always present, and vanity, together with much real delicacy of feeling, enters into business matters. A fact this which Englishmen dealing with Portuguese have been slower to recognise in the past than other nations. Moreover the Portuguese is harassed out of his wits by the details of business, he likes a good lump sum down rather than much larger but gradual profits, he goes for the pounds and leaves the pennies to look after themselves. If he sees the advantage of an enterprise, he rarely combines with this intelligence the necessary perseverance and force of character to carry it through. Yet here as always the Portuguese shows a marvellous inclination to fritter away his energies in matters of the minutest interest and minor importance, an inability to omit, to leave off. They either have no method or a method so minutely conceived that it is almost certain to break down in practice. Portuguese scholarship sometimes vies with German in unprofitable minuteness. For instance, Alexandre Herculano, the historian, wrote a few fine poems: one of his Portuguese critics has taken the trouble to ascertain the number of verses (6,800) contained in all his original poems and translations.
Religion.
In religion, again, the same vagueness. Many Portuguese prefer an undefined pantheism and a mystic love of Nature or Humanity to dogmatic beliefs. The ostentatious art of Roman Catholic ceremonies and the exact precision of Protestant services are both in a sense congenial to them, the former appealing to their fondness for pomp and show, the latter to their quiet thoughtfulness. But neither the one nor the other affects them with sufficient force to fasten upon their minds a fanaticism which is foreign to dreamy and comfortable natures. The Roman Catholic religion exercises a greater influence on the dramatic character of the Spanish than on the essentially lyrical and idyllic nature of the Portuguese. Nor do the latter show any marked enthusiasm for Protestantism, although the number of Protestants is certainly larger than it is in Spain. Perhaps it is too clear and reasonable for them. They require vagueness and mystery.
Contrasts.
The character of a Portuguese is much more rarely than that of a Spaniard all of one piece. The Spaniard’s, clear-cut and angular, admits less readily of contrasts and contradictions, whereas the very vagueness of the Portuguese enables it to combine opposing elements. Certainly, at least, there would seem to be many puzzling inconsistencies in the character of the Portuguese people. For they are like a quiet stream with sudden falls. They are fatalists, but with moments of heroic rebellion and effort, apathetic, with bursts of energy in private and revolution in public life; kindly and docile, yet with outbreaks of harshness and arrogance, indifferent yet with fugitive enthusiasms and a real love of progress and change. They are mystic and poetical with intervals of intense utilitarianism, erratically practical, falling from idle dreams to a keen relish for immediate profit. They combine vanity with diffidence and pessimism; naïveté, which makes them the butt of Spanish stories, with slyness, whereby they have their revenge; indolence with love of sport and adventure; respect for the feelings of others with fondness for satire, sarcasm, and ridicule. They go easily from heights of rapture to depths of melancholy and suicidal despair, from frank trustfulness to extremes of suspicion and intrigue, and their dreamy thoughtfulness passes at rare intervals to explosions of passion and abuse.
The Real and the Ideal.
The fact is that both in life and literature they are incorrigibly romantic, and when they turn from their romantic dreams to reality they are peculiarly exposed to the danger of not considering it worth an effort. They let things be, they easily persuade themselves that things must be as they are, or that they are as they in words imagine them; and so in their saudade for some impossible ideal they sink into desleixo and drift (deixarse-ir, deixarse-estar). Or the Portuguese will continue to live in his romanticism and ignore reality altogether; his vanity helps him to ignore it; he will wear cheap and garish chains and rings and trinkets and imagine himself rich, he will eke out the picture by the help of his quick imagination and ever-ready flow of words, heaping rhetoric and exaggeration, and in his vagueness drifting ere he is aware into falsehood. Then, if his efforts to impose the picture of his imagining on others at his own valuation fail, he will feel hurt by their brutal directness, their incapacity to see that a mere string of words may move mountains.
“Desleixo.”
They are taxed with laziness, but it should at least be observed that the laziness is not due to lack of energy, but rather to the conviction that “it is not worth while”—desleixo. When a thing does appear to be worth while the desleixo disappears like a cast-off mask. The amount of work achieved, for instance, by some Portuguese politicians or men-of-letters is extraordinarily large.
More serious is the accusation that they do not know what the word justice means, hate or love, acquit or condemn, fawn or bully, persecute or place on a pinnacle as occasion offers, and lose all sense of fair play in their vindictiveness. But after all it is the attraction of the Latin temperament that it is quick and impulsive, even if it therefore rarely attains that impartial justice which is all-important for the ruling of an Empire, but the absence of which certainly adds a picturesque and unforeseen element to life.